nian so rises 


rein tgieosta Mamie far, Till ark ge ates he St west BRIN etn on tori dg eletinth Mnrihighors SMO Retinal piiicieebv amt agente toe eee porAey 


aries 


aah 





















Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/presenttendencieOOknud 





Present Tendencies, a 
ious: Thought 


BY 
ALBERT C. KNUDSON, Theol.D. 


Professor of Systematic Theology in Boston University 





THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1924, by 
ALBERT C. KNUDSON 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


DEDICATED 
TO 
THE THEOLOGICAL FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY 
OF BERLIN IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF THE 
HONORARY DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY 
CONFERRED UPON THE AUTHOR IN 
DECEMBER, 1923 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 


THe MODERN LHOUGHT WORLD! Shc es 


Science, ancient and modern, p. 15—Democracy, 
political and industrial, p. 16—Democracy, political, 
ethical, and dynamic, p. 19—Democracy and Chris- 
tianity, p. 22—The belief in social progress, p. 23— 
The socio-economic interest, p. 25—Science and reli- 
gion, p. 27—Science and materialism, p. 30—Science 
and positivism, p. 35—Criticism of positivism, p. 39 
—The Copernican astronomy and Christianity, p. 43 
—Darwinism and Christianity, p. 45—The scientific 
idea of the reign of law and its bearing on religion, p. 47 
—The naturalistic and ethical conceptions of progress, 
p. 51—Relation of the modern idea of progress to Chris- 
tianity, p. 55—Origin of the modern socio-economic 
interest, p. 59—Sociology and religion, p. 62—Social- 
ism and religion, p. 64—The present problem confront- 
ing Christianity, p. 70. 


CHAPTER II 


THE PROBLEM OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY.........+.-6% 


Modern thought autonomous, p. 74—Religion author- 
itarian in its tendency, p. 75—Definition of authority, 
p. 79—Authority, pedagogical, sociological, and episte- 
mological, p. 81—The conflict between science and 
biblical authoritarianism, p. 88—The doctrine of bibli- 
cal infallibility, p. 90—Metaphysical dualism and its 
relation to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, p. 93— 
Empiricism and its bearing on the doctrine of infalli- 


Z 


74 


8 CONTENTS 


PAGE 
bility, p. 95—-The allegorical method of interpretation, 
p. 97—The principle of ecclesiastical authority, p. 102 
—The Protestant rejection of ecclesiastical infallibility 
and allegorism, p. 106—The Protestant conception of 
biblical infallibility and its relation to modern thought, 
p. 110—Natural science and its relation to the Bible, 
p. 114—Biblical criticism, p. 115—-The idea of evolution 
as applied to the Bible, p. 119—Bearing of the doctrine 
of the divine immanence and the Kantian idea of the 
creative activity of thought on our conception of inspira- 
tion, p. 121—Pragmatism and its bearing on the prob- 
lem of biblical authority, p. 124—The modern reinter- 
pretation of the idea of authority, p. 126—The true 
authority of Scripture, p. 128. 


CHAPTER III 


EXPERIENCE AS A Basis OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF........ 132 


The relation of philosophical empiricism to religion, 
p. 132—Theological empiricism distinguished from tra- 
ditional empiricism, p. 137—The Ritschlian type of 
theological empiricism, p. 138—Theological empiricism 
as represented by D. C. Macintosh, p. 141—The appeal 
to experience in Roman Catholic apologetics, p. 147— 
Early Protestantism and its use of the evidence of 
Christian experience, p. 150—-Pietism and its appeal to 
Christian experience, p. 152—-Schleiermacher as the 
founder of empirical theology, p. 154—-Empirical theol- 
ogy and conservatism, p. 159—-Theological empiricism 
as represented by the ‘Erlanger School,” p. 161—The 
Ritschlian theology and its significance, p. 166—The 
psychology of religion and its bearing on the evidential 
value of Christian experience, p. 175—The relation of 
religious experience to faith, p. 179—The relation of 
faith to mysticism, p. 180—The self-verifying power of 
faith, p. 183—Experience as the norm of Christian 
belief, p. 186. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER IV 


REASON AS A BASIS OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 


The relation of rationalism and empiricism to each 
other, p. 190—The application of the empirical prin- 
ciple to religious belief, p. 192——Philosophical rational- 
ism and its relation to religion, p. 197—-Reasons for 
the religious antipathy to “rationalism,” p. 198—Dis- 
tinction between Kantian rationalism and the doctrine 
of inriate ideas, p. 201—Distinction between intellectual 
and ethical rationalism, p. 203—The place of reason in 
the authoritarian period of the church’s history, p. 205 
—Deism, p. 207—‘German rationalism,” p. 21I— 
Hegelian rationalism, p. 214—The history-of-religion 
school, p. 219—Neo-rationalism and the question of 
miracle, p. 221—Neo-rationalism and its attitude toward 
philosophy, p. 225——Troeltsch’s conception of the nature 
of religion, p. 230—The neo-rationalistic attitude toward 
history, p. 232—Troeltsch’s view of Jesus, p. 235. 
Troeltsch’s doctrine of a religious a priori and its relation 
to philosophical relativism, p. 241—Reason as a ground 
of religious belief, p. 248. 


eenmernreerensee 


CHAPTER V 


THE SociAL GOSPEL AND Its THEOLOGICAL IMPLICA- 


Ries les 0.) 6) 0) ad ve VP oue, | wiis) 8) le) er er eeu itm. a \e\ 6) (a) wi e\ bites 6) o/f6 Lgl ve kei ce eT ®. 


Utility as a test of religious truth, p. 251—-Chatterton 
Hill’s theory of religion, p. 253—Karl Marx’s theory 
of religion, p. 254—Emile Durkheim’s view of religion, 
p. 258—T. N. Carver’s application of the principle of 
utility to religion, p. 262—-The place of individual sac- 
rifice in an ideal society, p. 267—-Theism and religion, 
p. 268—Utility transformed from an external to an inner 
test of religion, p. 269—The main elements in the social 
problem, p. 272—The belief in social progress, p. 272— 
The subordination of the individual to society, p. 274 
—Prominence of the economic factor, p. 275--The 


251 


ike) CONTENTS 


PAGE 


revolt of the proletariat, p. 276—Capitalism, p. 277— 
Nationalism, p. 278—Bearing of the social problem upon 
religion, p. 281—The social gospel in its more general 
form, p. 282—The fundamental attitude in religion 


to-day as compared with that of the past, p. 288— 


The social gospel in its more radical form, p. 291—The 
complexity of the social problem, p. 296—No distinctive 
Christian social theory, p. 297—-The social ideal unreal- 
izable on earth, p. 299—Bearing of the social gospel on 
the conception of God, p. 302—The idea of a finite God, 
p. 305—The social gospel and the doctrine of sin, p. 
308—Redemption from the standpoint of the social 
gospel, p. 311—Relation of the social gospel to the 
belief in the future life, p. 316—Conclusion, p. 320. 


FOREWORD 


Tuer Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw Univer- 
sity, to which this series of addresses belongs, 
was founded by the Reverend Marmaduke H. 
Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana Confer- 
ence of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The 
object of the donor was to found a perpetual lec- 
tureship which would bring to the University as 
lecturers “persons of high and wide repute, of 
broad and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere 
to the evangelical system of Christian faith. 
The selection of lecturers may be made from the 
world of Christian scholarship, without regard to 
denominational divisions. Each course of lec- 
tures is to be published in book form by an emi- 
nent publishing house and sold at cost to the fac- 
ulty and students of the university.” 

Lectures thus far published under this founda- 
tion: 

1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes. 

1914, The Literary Primacy of the Buble, 
George Peck Eckman. 

1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis 
John McConnell. 

1918, Religion and War, William Herbert 
Perry Faunce. 

II 


12 FOREWORD 


1919, Some Aspects of International Christian- 
ity, John Keiman. 

1920, What Must the Church Do to Be Saved? 
Ernest Fremont Tittle. 

1921, Social Rebuilders, Charles Reynolds 
Brown. 

1922, This Mind, William Fraser McDowell. 

1924, Present Tendencies in Religious Thought, 
Albert C. Knudson. 

GEORGE R. GROSE, 
President DePauw University. 


PREFACE 


THESE lectures are partly historical and partly 
critical. They aim to give a general survey of 
the modern thought wérld in its relation to re- 
ligion and to show how Christianity has been 
and is adjusting itself to its new environment. 
The field is a broad one, and the treatment neces- 
sarily general. Chief attention is devoted to 
what may be called the crucial question of our 
day, the question of the truth of religion. Can 


Christianity, after renouncing its claim to an ob- / =~ 


jective and infallible authority, maintain its verity 
in our scientific age? In answering this ques- 
tion both friend and foe have appealed to ex- 
perience, reason, and utility as the ultimate tests 
of truth. The nature and cogency of these ap- 
peals form the main subject of inquiry in the 
present volume. No attempt at systematic com- 
pleteness has been made, but the more important 
tendencies in religious thought along the line in- 
dicated are expounded and discussed. 

I wish to express my thanks to President 
George R. Grose for the privilege of delivering 
these lectures on the Mendenhall Foundation. As 
here presented they differ considerably from the 


13 


14 PREFACE 


form in which they were delivered. They are 
about twice as long, and have for the most part 
the character of studies rather than addresses. 

My friends and colleagues, Dr. Edgar S. 
Brightman and Mr. Earl Marlatt, have kindly 
read the manuscript and given me the benefit of 
their highly valued judgment on many points 
having to do both with style and content. For 
this service I am deeply indebted to them and’ 
desire here to express my Ba and 
gratitude. 

Subsequent to their delivery on the Menten 
hall Foundation, these lectures, with President 
Grose’s kind permission, were also given before 
the faculty and students of Gammon Theological . 
Seminary; and it is my hope that in their printed 
~ form they may serve a useful purpose among the 
friends of that important institution as well as 
among those of De Pauw University. 

The literature in the field I have covered is 
vast. From a number of representative works I 
have quoted briefly, and for permission to do so 
I wish to thank the various publishers. A detailed 
acknowledgment of my obligations in this respect 
will be found at the end of the book. 


ALBERT C. KNUDSON. 


CHART t Raet 
THE MODERN THOUGHT WORLD 


Ir is customary, in analyzing the modern 
thought world, to reduce its characteristic ele- 
ments to two outstanding and significant move- 
ments: science and democracy. 

The scientific movement is not peculiar to the 
modern age. It had its place in ancient Greece. 
Aristotle and many others emphasized the im- 
portance of the empirical method. But with 
them it led to no such extraordinary discoveries 
and inventions as it has in the modern world. 
It did not become a popular movement. It did not 
captivate the imagination of the people. It did 
not become a cult. To-day with many it is a 
religion. “My religion,” said Renan, “is now as 
ever the progress of reason; in other words, the 
progress of science.” Magic, religion, and sci- 
ence, according to Sir James Frazer, represent 
three successive stages in the development of the 
human spirit. As religion in the past displaced 
magic, so science to-day is displacing religion. 
More and more, we are told, men are actually, 
whatever may be their professions, placing their 


15 


| 16 PRESENT. TENDENCIES IN 


hope, not in God, but in science. It is the solid 
achievements of science rather than the unsub- 
stantial dreams of religion that now form the 
real ground of human confidence and the real 
stimulus to human endeavor. In any case it is 
the empirical method of natural science that is 
to-day the accepted standard by which all truth 
is to be tested. The age of metaphysics belongs 
to the past. Empirical science is now dominant. 
Its sway, whether we like it or not, is at present 
generally recognized in the field of theoretical 
knowledge. And there can be no doubt, as C. A. 
Ellwood says, that science has been “the main 
element disturbing the habits, standards, and 
beliefs of the past in the modern world.”! 

What science thus is to the theoretical reason 
of the modern man, that, it is said, is democracy 
to his practical reason. It is the norm and guid- 
ing star in the work of political and social re- 
construction. ‘The democratic movement, like the 
scientific, is not, it is true, wholly modern. It 
has its roots in the ancient past. But it has in 
modern times received such extraordinary accre- 
tions of strength, and has become to such a large 
extent a popular faith that it may properly be © 
regarded as characteristically modern. Like sci- 
ence democracy, too, has become a cult. 

Fifty to a hundred and fifty years ago it was 


‘The Reconstruction of Religion, p. 11. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT =—_-7 


) chiefly political democracy that awakened the 
ardent hopes of the Western world. ‘To Maz- 
zini and his disciples,” says Bryce, “‘as to Jefferson 
and many another fifty years before, Democracy 
was a Religion, or the natural companion, of a 
religion, or a substitute for religion, from which 
effects on morals and life were hoped similar to 
those which the preachers of new creeds have so 
often seen with the eyes of faith.”2 Mazzini, for 
instance, said: “This yearning of the human 
mind toward an indefinite progress, this force 
that urges the generations. onward toward the 
future; this impulse of universal association; the 
banner of young Europe waving on every side; 
this varied, multiform, endless warfare every- 
where going on against tyranny; this cry of the 
nations arising from the dust to reclaim their 
rights, and call their rulers to account for the 
injustice and oppression of the ages; this crum- 
bling of ancient dynasties at the breath of the 
people; this anathema upon old creeds, this rest- 
less search after new; this youthful Europe 
_ springing from the old, like the moth from the 
chrysalis; this glowing life arising in the midst 
of death; this world in resurrection—is this not 
poetry?’ In such an utterance as this we mani- 
festly have all the glow of a religious faith. But 
powerful as this early faith in political democ- 
‘Modern Democracies, ii, p. 533. 


18 | PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


racy was, it gradually lost its hold on the minds 
of men. As Hobhouse says, “the golden radiance 
of its morning hopes has long since in into 
the light of common day.” 

This does not mean, however, that the general 
idea of democracy has lost its power of appeal to 
the modern mind. “Democracy” is as much as 
ever a term to conjure with. To “make the world 
safe for democracy” was the battle cry of only 
a few years ago. But what is awakening popu- 
lar enthusiasm to-day is not political democracy; 
it is industrial or social democracy. Political 
democracy, it is claimed, has failed. It has not 
brought the nations of the world into more 
friendly relations with each other; it has not 
welded together the different strata of human 
society and created between them a mutual feel- 
ing of fellowship and good will; it has not satis- 
fied the yearnings of men for a better social 
order; it has not purified politics nor removed it 
from the sinister influences of the Money Power. 
Indeed, political democracy has become simply 
the tool of wealth. The capitalistic class still 
rules in the councils of state. And this, it is 
held, will necessarily continue to be the case until 
wealth itself is democratized. The hope of the 
world, therefore, lies in such a reconstruction of 
the industrial and social order as will put eco- 
nomic power as well as abstract political rights 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 19 


into the hands of the people. Only in this way, 
we are told, can government become truly demo- 
cratic. Political democracy, if it is to be real, 
must be based on industrial democracy. _ The 
latter has, consequently, become the watchword 
of social reform and of socialism. To it the 
social hope is now pinning its faith; and this 
hope with multitudes has become a religion. It 
has displaced the political liberalism of fifty to a 
hundred and fifty years ago and is to-day the 
gospel of the proletariat. 

The democratic movement has thus undergone 
a marked change during the past fifty years; but 
faith in the essential principle of democracy still 
persists. For democracy, it is felt, is deeper than 
any particular expression of it. It is a spirit, an 
interest, an ideal. But what is this interest or 
ideal? Is it simple and definite? Or is it com- 
plex and variable? The latter would seem to 
be the case. At any rate the word ‘“‘democracy”’ 
has various meanings, and in the interest of 
clear thinking these should be distinguished. We 
have, to begin with, several different forms of 
democracy. In addition to political and indus- 
trial democracy we have religious democracy and 
democracy in personal and social relations. But 
these different forms are due simply to the dif- 
ferent fields in which the democratic principle 
is applied. They do not necessarily imply dif- 


20 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ferent conceptions of the democratic principle it- 
self, though they naturally carry with them dif- 
ferent emphases. In democracy of a personal and 
social character stress is properly laid on the idea 
of “fraternity”; in religious and political democ- 
racy the emphasis by way of reaction against 
various forms of tyranny falls almost inevitably 
on the idea of “liberty”; and in industrial de- 
mocracy, concerned as it is with economic prob- 
lems, interest naturally gravitates toward the idea 
of “equality.” These different emphases, how- 
ever, are only incidental to the general idea of . 
democracy. It is with the latter that we are 
concerned. 

The term “democracy” is used in at least three 
different senses, and corresponding to these the 
democratic movement has three distinct aspects. 
The first may be termed the political or govern- 
mental, the second the ethical, and the third the 
dynamic. | 

It is in the first of these senses that the word 
“democracy” is commonly used, and the demo- 
cratic movement is commonly regarded as pri-. 
marily political. In this sense democracy means 
“the right of the majority to rule.” “What- 
ever else democracy may be,” says John Morley, 
“it means in our modern age government by pub- 
lic opinion—the public opinion of a majority 
armed with a political or social supremacy by 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 21 


the electoral vote, from whatever social classes 
and strata that majority may be made up.’ 

In its ethical sense democracy means the sa- 
credness of the life of the individual. It means 
that every individual is to be treated as an end, 
not a means. It means, so far as social organiza- 
tion goes, that there should be an open road to 
talent, that is, an equal opportunity for all; and 
this in turn implies responsiveness on the part of 
those in authority to the just needs and desires of 
all. Or, as Dewey puts it, it means the resolve 
“that the supreme test of all political institutions 
and industrial arrangements shall be the contribu- 
tion they make to the all-around growth of every 
member of society.” 

What I have termed the dynamic meaning of 
democracy is not so commonly recognized. Yet 
it is the basal and in a certain sense the most 
characteristic element in the modern democratic 
movement. I refer to the belief in social progress 
through man’s own initiative. G. P. Adams, in 
his able and suggestive work on Idealism and the 
Modern Age, puts the case thus: “Democracy 
as an idea and an attitude stands for man’s in- 
terest in mastering and molding his world rather 
than in participating in structures which are al- 
ready real” (p. 23). “The conscious conviction,” 
he says, “that the only social order fit for man to 


*Miscellanies (Fourth Series), p. 266. 


a 


22 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


live in is one which he himself has made and can 
control—and which he can unmake if he so de- 
sires—this conviction is but democracy come to 
full consciousness of its meaning and its power” 
(p. 7). In ne with this is Mazzini’s definition 
of democracy as “the progress of all through all, 
under the leadership of the best and the wisest,” 
and also Morley’s statement that “what guides, in- 
spires, and sustains democracy is conviction of 
upward and onward progress in the destinies of 
mankind.’ 

These three meanings of democracy sustain a 
certain relation to each other, and they all repre- 
sent aspects of the modern democratic movement. 
But in its political and ethical sense democracy is 
not from the religious point of view characteris- 
tically modern. It does not stand opposed to tra- 
ditional Christian thought. Rather does it con- 
stitute a bond of union between the modern world 
and the ancient Christian world. The ultimate 
basis and the historic root of ethical democracy 
_ are to be found in the Christian conception of the 
direct and equal relationship of all men to God. 
In this sense Ludwig Stein is right in saying that 
“the Bible of the Old and New Testaments is and 
will continue to be the world’s most democratic 
book.” The political consequences of biblical 


“Miscellanies (Fourth Series), p. 2grf. 
"Die Soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie, p. 505. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 23 


democracy were not, it is true, worked out in the 
ancient world. Conditions rendered that virtually 
impossible. But the modern movement toward 
democracy is, as C. A. Ellwood says, “the political 
counterpart” of Christianity. “With its em- 
phasis upon fraternity,” he adds, “and upon the 
equality and liberty which are necessary for fra- ! 
ternity, democracy is evidently the same move- 
ment in the social and political realm as Chris- 
tianity in the ethical and religious realm.” “The 
Protestant Reformation,” he further says, “pre- 
pared the way for the individual freedom of the 
modern world. The Methodist movement among 
English-speaking peoples again undoubtedly was 
a forerunner of nineteenth-century democracy in 
Britain and America.’’®. Democracy, therefore, 
in its common political and ethical meaning does 
not from the religious standpoint constitute a 
differentiating feature of the modern thought _ 
world. we 

The situation, however, is different with de- 
mocracy in its dynamic sense. Here we come 
upon a characteristic modern idea. The belief in 
social progress as a law of human life is of 
comparatively recent origin., A quite different 
view prevailed in antiquity fort ati thes the Middle 
Ages. The Christian tradition did not look for- 
ward to an indefinite period of progress for man- 


*The Reconstruction of Religion, pp. 70, 248, 76. 


ee 


24 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


kind on this planet, and least of all did it con- 
template any such progress as du€ to man’s own 
initiative. The latter idea grew up in connection 
with and as a result of the development of mod- 
ern science, and is manifestly one of the outstand- 
ing as well as distinctive beliefs of our day. “The 
Siena of all modern ideas,” says R. B. Perry, 

“in its originality, in its widespread adoption and 
in its far-reaching importance is, I believe, the 
idea that man can make his own way through all 
the difficulties and dangers that beset him by 
means of applied science or technology.’” It is 
this idea that is the driving force back of the 
democratic movement and that constitutes what 
I call dynamic democracy. G. P. Adams goes 
so far as to identify “democracy” with this par- 
ticular interpretation of it; but the political and 
ethical associations of the term are so natural and 
inevitable that its unqualified use in the above 
dynamic sense is likely to lead to confusion. It 
seems better, therefore, to substitute for the word 
“democracy,” as used by Adams, its specific and 
essential meaning, which is that of belief in social 
progress through human effort. - It is this belief 
rather than democracy in the general sense of the 
term that constitutes the second great character- 
istic factor in the modern thought world, science 
being the first. 


‘The Present Conflict of Ideals, p. 58. 
” 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 25 


But science and the belief in social progress 
are not the only great and distinctive elements 
in the modern “idea-system.” There is at least 
one other that must be added if we are to under- 
stand the age in which we live. This third fac- 
tor may be termed the socio-economic interest. 
As the name indicates, this interest is double: it 
is both social and economic. But it is also single 
in the sense that its two constituent elements in- 
volve each other. The effort, for instance, is be- 
ing made in our day to solve the social problem 
through economic means and the economic prob- 
lem through social means.. The two interests are 
thus fused into a single socio-economic interest. 
This interest, like the belief in social progress, 
stands related to the democratic movement, espe- 
cially in its more recent ‘industrial’ form. The 
modern age taken as a whole has, it is true, laid 
much stress on the rights of the individual, but 
_ during the past century its tendency has been 
strongly toward the social emphasis. The indi- 
vidual, it is held, cannot be redeemed apart from 
society; and the redemption alike of the indi- 
vidual and of society, it is contended, is impossible 
without the improvement of economic conditions. 
Interest, consequently, tends to center in political 
and economic measures. It is to them that the 
people are looking for relief, rather than to any 
form of moral or spiritual regeneration. The 


& 


26 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


socio-economic interest is thus most distinctly a 
this-worldly interest, and so stands more or less 
_ opposed to the traditional Christian attitude. 
Science, the belief in progress, and the socio- 
economic interest—these, then, are the great out- 
standing characteristics of the modern thought 
world. Together they tend to form a unified 
system. The dynamic of the system is found in 
the belief in progress through human effort; the 
goal is determined by the socio-economic interest ; 
and the means of its attainment are furnished by 
science. This is the logical relation of the three 
factors when viewed as an organic whole. But 
actually and historically the scientific movement 
is and has been basal and primary. It is the 
achievements of science more than anything else 
that have given rise to the belief in social prog-~ 
ress and that have stimulated the modern eco- 
nomic interest. No doubt the economic interest 
and the belief in social progress have in turn con- 
tributed to the development of science. But as a 
characteristic modern movement science came 
first. It is science also that is theoretically most 
important and that has most profoundly affected 
traditional Christian belief. It is with it, therefore, 
that we must take our start in the study of the 
modern thought world from the religious point of 
view. Science is the center from which radiate) \ 
the great characteristic features of the modern 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 27 


age. But science, it is to be borne in mind, is 
not simply a theoretical movement. It is a prac- 
tical attitude, a spiritual impulse, and as such 1s 
linked up with the belief in progress and with the 
socio-economic interest. These three forces con- 
stitute a kind of religion or substitute for re- 
ligion. What Christianity consequently confronts 
in the modern world is not simply certain intel- 
lectual divergences from its own doctrinal stand- 
point, but a more or less alien and hostile faith. 
This faith we must understand, if we are really 
to comprehend the task that faces the Christian 
Church to-day; and to understand it we need to 
study more in detail its component elements. We 
begin with science, the basal and central element. 


SCIENCE 


In the abstract there is no conflict between 
science and religion. Each has its own distinc- 
tive field. Science in its purity is strictly empir- 
ical. It is concerned simply with facts, with 
their classification and the laws that govern their 
appearance. The question of cause in the eff- 
cient or metaphysical sense of the term lies be- 
yond its domain. Science has nothing to do with 
the first cause or the final cause of things. The 
ultimate explanation of the world belongs to re- 
ligion and to philosophy. What religion is inter- 
ested in and asserts, is the dependence of the 


28 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


world upon God and its adaptability to his pur- 
poses. It has no vital concern in any particular 
view concerning the history of the world and the 
history of man. To settle questions of this kind 
is the task of science. Its function is. to ascer- 
tain the order and sequence of phenomena in the 
space and time world. What religion, on the 
other hand, is concerned with is the power world, 
the world of efficient cause and purpose. So long 
as it is able to find back of the phenomenal order 
the power and purpose of God, it is content. 
Science may reconstruct the popular and tradi- 
tional notions relative to that order as it Wishes ; 
religion in its essential nature is unaffected by 
it. Between pure science and pure religion there 
- is, therefore, no conflict. One does not exclude 
the other, and neither necessarily implies the 
other. They sustain to each other a relation of 
complete neutrality. 

But while this is true in the ideal, the actual 
relation of modern science and religion to each 
other has been very different. Between the two 
there has been a long warfare.® This is due to 
the fact that neither has existed in its purity. 
Religion has come down to us with a large ad- 
mixture of extraneous material, scientific, histori- 
cal, and philosophical. Much of this extraneous 


“See Andrew D. White, 4 History of the Warfare 
of Science with Theology. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 29 


material was at the beginning of the modern era 
so closely interwoven with the strands of genuine 
religious faith that together they seemed to form 
a necessary unity. To attempt to detach the re- 
ligious element from its traditional theology and 
its traditional intellectual associations seemed de- 
structive of the religious element itself. Hence 
religion has at times been misled into opposing 
modern science in its own field because of its 
divergences from the traditions of the past. On 
the other hand, science has seldom recognized its 
own limitations. It has constantly been tempted 
to take itself too seriously. It has regarded it- 
self as competent to pronounce upon questions 
that lie beyond its proper domain. The result is 
that much that has passed for science has really 
belonged to philosophy and theology, and has 
been anti-religious in its tendency. The so-called 
scientific philosophies have also usually been un- 
favorable to religion. There has thus been 
mutual aggression on the part both of religion 
and science. Science has invaded the realm of 
religion, and religion the realm of science. The 
consequence has been a long-drawn-out struggle 
between them. Fach side has had its victories 
and its defeats. Some issues between them have 
been settled, but complete peace has not yet been 
attained. The general tendency has been, as the 
struggle progressed, to establish a modus vivendi 


30 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


by purging each side of its extraneous elements. 
Religion has been more and more divested of 
its traditional and obsolete science; and science 
has been gradually relieved of its unwarranted 
metaphysical “assumptions. The movement has 
thus been gradually in the direction of a mutual 
understanding. 

But in this process of adjustment Christian 
thought has undergone marked changes, and in 
order to be prepared to understand these changes 
we need to consider a little more fully the main 
points involved in the past struggle. In what 
particular respects, we consequently ask, has the 
scientific movement been actually or apparently 
hostile to historic Christianity? In answer to this 
question three different specifications may be 
made and briefly discussed. 

First, science has tended to eliminate the idea 
of God from human thought. It has been the 
breeder of materialistic and positivistic philos- 
ophies and so the ally of atheism and agnosticism. 
In this rdle it has, to be sure, transgressed its own 
limits and been untrue to its own distinctive 
nature. But that as an historical movement it has 
actually had these anti-religious effects, can hard- 
ly be questioned. For a considerable time natural 
science was interpreted or, rather, misinterpreted, 
in a materialistic sense. It did not itself give 
rise to materialism, Materialism is an ancient 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 31 


type of thought. It is, as Lange says in begin- 
ning his famous History of Materialism, “as old 
as philosophy, but no older.’’ That is, material- 
ism is not an immediate datum of experience. 
It is as much a theoretical construction as is any 
philosophy. But it is a theory into which the 
human mind almost instinctively falls. For the 
mind goes directly to its sense objects. These 
are apparently the real things in experience, and 
they seem to exist in lumpish externality to all 
thought. Materiality, consequently, comes with 
many people to be the mark and test of reality. 
This was the case in early Greek thought. The 
first Greek philosophers were materialists. But 
they regarded matter as living; they were hylo- 
zoists. It was Democritus who in the form of 
atomism. first introduced a consistent and thor- 
oughgoing materialism. He did not originate the 
atomic theory, but it was he who first brought it 
to full development. “Only in opinion,” he said, 
“consists sweetness, bitterness, warmth, cold, 
color; in truth, there is nothing but atoms and 
empty space.”’® This theory was later given con- 
siderable currency by Lucretius. But on the 
whole it was the idealistic reaction under Soc- 
rates, Plato, and Aristotle that gave direction to 
later Greek thought; and with the triumph of 
Christianity this type of philosophy naturally be- 

"Quoted in Lange’s History of Materialism, i, p. 23. 


32 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


came dominant, remaining such till the dawn of 
the modern era. 

With the rise of modern science we have a 
revival of materialism. The atomic theory of 
Democritus lent itself readily to the purposes of 
natural science, and hence the two seemed natu- 
rally leagued together. The scientists did not as 
a rule draw the full metaphysical implications of 
atomism, and hence cannot in strict accuracy be 
called materialists. They were rather dualists, 
acknowledging a spiritual reality alongside of the 
physical; practical considerations led them to take 
this position. But modern materialism has al- 
ways asserted its alliance with science. It regards 
itself as implicit in natural science. Materialism, 
it is claimed, is “a simple extension of science”; 
it is “the philosophical generalization of science’; 
it is “the scientific philosophy.” And if we accept 
the common scientific distinction between primary 
and secondary qualities as expressing respectively 
the self-subsisting world and the world of passing 
appearance, we practically, as Pringle-Pattison 
says, “adopt the fundamental presupposition of 
materialism.’’ The path from natural science to a 
materialistic philosophy is thus an easy one, and 
to many it seems the only logical path. Enrico 
Ferri, for instance, the distinguished Italian so- 
cialist, says: “It is not socialism that develops 
atheism. . . . The struggle for atheism is the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 33 


business of science.”!° His idea apparently, like 
that of many others, is that natural science is able 
to explain the world without appealing to a spir- 
itual principle of any kind, and hence is now pre- 
pared, as Comte said, to conduct God to the bor- 
der of the universe and there bow him out with 
thanks for past services. 

But easy and inevitable as materialistic atheism 
seems to many a mind trained in natural science, 
it has not been able to stand the test of modern 
criticism. Psychological analysis since the time 
of Berkeley and Hume has made it clear that the 
“things” of materialistic theory are not given in 
immediate experience; they are intellectual con- 
structs. Logic with its sharper definition of 
“matter” and “spirit” has shown that there is an 
impassable gulf between these two kinds of being, 
and that the psychical cannot be deduced from the 
physical. Epistemology has pointed out the fact 
that a necessitarian system, such as materialism, 
overthrows the distinction between truth and 
error and involves reason in complete collapse. 
Ethics has made it evident that such a system 
also undermines the logical basis of responsibility 
and thus destroys morality altogether. Meta- 
physics, furthermore, has shown that material or 
impersonal reality cannot be construed in thought 
without inner contradiction. It is only on the 


“Socialism and Modern Science, pp. 65f. 


34 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


personal plane that the change and identity and 
the unity and plurality involved in the concep- 
tion of reality can be brought into harmony with 
each other. | | eke: 

- These different lines of criticism. have grad- 
ually had their effect on thoughtful people, and 
the result is that at least in professional philo- 
sophical circles materialism has fallen into dis- 
repute. If men still hold essentially the material-_ 
istic position, they usually camouflage it by re- 
pudiating the term “materialism” and calling 
their system “‘monism’” or “naturalism” or “ag- 
nosticism.” But under whatever name it may be 
known, materialism has undergone a marked de- 
cline in favor during the past fifty years. Men 
have gradually come to see that Comte was right 
when he said that materialists or atheists are 
“the most illogical of theologists, because they 
occupy themselves with theological problems, and 
yet reject the only appropriate method of han- 
dling them.”** As a matter of fact, “to think 
clearly about materialism is,” as Lange says, “to 
refute it.” “It is,’ says Eucken, “precisely the 
sharper modern definition of the conception of 
body and soul,,a precision vital to exact science, 
which has made materialism impossible as a cos- 
mic philosophy.” Bowne is, then, but stating a 
simple fact when he characterizes materialism or 


“A General View of Positivism, p. 50. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT A AS 


atheism as “philosophical illiteracy.” It is only 
among the uncritical that it still has a certain 
vogue. 

Natural science, consequently, is not so com- 
monly interpreted i in.a materialistic sense as was 
“once the case. But this does not mean that it 
has ceased to be a disturber of our religious peace. 
The tendency now is to interpret science in a 
positivistic sense, and this is hardly less inimical 
to religion than materialism and atheism. For- 
mally the positivistic interpretation of science 
marks a retreat on the part of anti-religious 
thinkers. It is a virtual confession on their part 
that in the field of metaphysics they have met de- 
feat. The truth is that metaphysics must either 
be idealistic and personalistic or cease to be a 
subject of scholarly investigation. And this is 
practically admitted by positivism. For the anti- 
religious thinker, therefore, to become a positivist 
is to surrender his first-line trenches. It means 
that he no longer has a metaphysic to oppose to 
that of religion. But this does not mean that he 
has relented in his opposition to religion, nor does 
it mean that he regards the second-line trenches 
to which he has withdrawn as any less secure or 
as any less advantageous for purposes of attack. 
Rather does he insist that it was only in ignor- 
ance that the first-line trenches were ever con- 
structed. They properly belong to no-man’s land. 


36 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


Metaphysics is not a region in which the human 
intellect can move safely about; indeed, it is not a 
region that the human intellect can even pene- 
trate. ‘Whether there is such a thing as meta- 
physical reality at all, it is claimed, is very doubt- 
ful. Substance and cause, as commonly under- 
stood, are misleading categories. They have no 
place in science. There is no real existence cor- 
responding to them. And even if there is, it is 
absolutely unknowable. So theism is as unten- 
able as materialism. What the positivistic inter- 
pretation of science does, therefore, is simply to 
change the line of attack upon religion. It is not 
now claimed that materialism is a more satisfac- 
tory metaphysics than theism. What is claimed 
is that both theism and materialism represent 
completely mistaken efforts of the human intel- 
lect. Knowledge is limited to the phenomenal 
world; it is exhausted in empirical science. Sci- 
ence, then, does not necessarily favor materialism 
as over against theism. It, rather, excludes both. 
And this is as fatal to religion as is materialism 
itself; it stamps all religion as illusion. For re- 
ligion has no second-line trenches to which it can 
retreat. It must maintain its belief in a meta- 
physical reality and a knowable metaphysical 
reality or surrender its own existence. A _ re- 
ligion without God and a knowable God is no 
religion. 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 37 


It is, of course, possible to combine philosoph- 
ical skepticism with religious faith and in this 
way apparently to effect a reconciliation between 
positivistic science and religion. But this at 
best is but a halfway measure, and as a matter 
of fact is true neither to the distinctive nature of 
religion nor to that of positivism. Strict positivism 
denies all knowledge of ultimate reality from 
whatever source it may come; and religion just 
as distinctly implies such knowledge. The fact 
that religion ascribes its knowledge of God to 
“revelation” or “faith” or some mystical expe- 
rience rather than to philosophical or scientific 
speculation does not in the least degree affect its 
fundamental claim to knowledge. It has recently 
been argued that if all religion requires 1s ig- 
norance, there is no danger of its being put out 
of business by science.'? But religion cannot live 
on ignorance. However distrustful religion may 
at times have been of human reason, it has never 
weakened in the confidence with which it has 
asserted the reality of God. Consistent posi- 
tivism and true religion thus stand fundamentally 
opposed to each other. 

But positivism has not, as a rule, taken the | 
form of a self-consistent system; it has, rather, 
represented a philosophical tendency. This ten- 


*See R. B. Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals, 
DP. 57: 


38 PRESENT. TENDENCIESGEN 


_ dency received its first clear modern expression 
in the sensationalistic idealism of David Hume. 
Since his time it has manifested itself in at least 
six other forms. We may distinguish the Posi- 
tivism of Auguste Comte, the Agnosticism of 
Herbert Spencer, Neo-Kantianism as represented 
by Albert Lange and the Marburg School, Prag- 
matism both of the James-Schiller and Dewey 
types, Empirio-criticism or the Philosophy of 
Pure Experience as expounded by Avenarius and 
Mach, and Neo-realism in both its English and 
American casts. Of these seven positivistic move- 
ments only two are thoroughgoing in their posi- 
tivism, and exclude altogether the religious idea 
of God. These are the Positivism of Comte and 
the Empirio-criticism of Avenarius and Mach. 
The other movements to some degree qualify their 
positivism, and hence are less dogmatic in their 
attitude toward religion. Pragmatism of the 
James-Schiller type has even been used as an 
apologetic for traditional religious faith; and 
Neo-Kantianism has not been altogether un- 
friendly to religion in its historical form. Some 
of the new realists leave a place for a finite God, 
and Spencer gave us a metaphysical Deity in the 
Unknowable. David Hume held to what has 
been termed an “attenuated theism.” He thought 
“that the cause or causes of order in the universe 
probably bear some remote analogy to human 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 39 


intelligence” ; but this conclusion, he said, “affords 
no inference that affects human life, or can be 
the source of any action or forbearance.’ Such 
a position is, of course, equivalent to practical 
atheism; and at times Hume was ready to commit 
all books on divinity and metaphysics to the 
flames on the ground that they contained “noth- 
ing but sophistry and illusion.” In this respect 
he represents the general as well as the logical 
tendency of the positivistic philosophies. What- 
ever concessions some of these philosophies may 
have made to religious faith, they incline as a. 
whole toward complete agnosticism and the theory 
of illusionism. Religion from their standpoint 
may be a useful and even a necessary factor in 
human life, but it is an illusion nevertheless. 
There is for them no knowable reality beyond 
that which is revealed in empirical science. This 
is the form which anti-religious philosophy com- 
monly takes to-day; and in some respects it is 
more insidious and more difficult to meet than the 
materialistic science of three quarters of a cen- 
tury ago. 

In dealing with the positivistic interpretation 
of science three points have been emphasized by 
_ idealistic critics. 

First, it has been pointed out that positivism 
is not science but an assertion about science. 
To limit knowledge to science is to transcend sci- 


40 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ence; and to base such a limitation of knowledge 
upon science is as much a dogmatic misinterpreta- 
tion of science as is materialism. 

In the second place, it has been shown that 
positivism isa reaction against a mistaken con- 
ception of metaphysics and that to a large extent 
it derives its strength from this misconception. 
It is supposed by many that metaphysics implies 
the existence of a back-lying substance, a core 
of being, distinct from the qualities and phenom- 
ena that constitute the world of our experience. 
This metaphysical reality is supposed to have a 
thing-like existence; indeed, it is spoken of as 
“the thing-in-itself.” And metaphysics, it is 
thought, is concerned solely with this hidden 
essence of things. But inquiry of this kind is 
bootless. Not only has history proved it such, 
but the most searching analysis of the structure 
of the human reason has shown that the thing-in- 
itself lies beyond the range of human knowledge. 
SO positivism rejects metaphysics altogether, and 
in doing so apparently falls in line with common 
sense. There is a popular gibe to the effect that 
“the metaphysician is a blind man in a dark room 
looking for a black hat that isn’t there’; and 
even a distinguished philosopher has humorously 
said that metaphysics is “the systematic misuse 
of a terminology expressly invented for that pur- 
pose.” But as a matter of fact the idea of the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Al 


thing-in-itself is the product of crude realism. 
Critical metaphysics finds no place for it. It sees 
in it simply “a phantom created by a misguided 
logic,” and the resulting agnosticism it attributes 
to a “perfectly gratuitous mystification.” Posi- 
tivism, then, is right in rejecting what some one 
has called “the great German fog-generator, the 
_thing-in-itself”’; but it is totally mistaken in sup- 
posing that this idea is essential to metaphysics 
and that the only alternative to its acceptance is 
the positivistic position. True metaphysics is 
concerned simply with the causal ground and 
connection of things. It recognizes no back-lying 
reality trying to peer through the masking phe- 
nomena of experience. This notion is a pure 
fiction, a mere shadow of the mind’s own throw- 
ing. But there is nevertheless an unpicturable 
bond of union between things; and the function 
of metaphysics is to lay bare this bond, to reduce 
the apparently disconnected facts of experience 
to a coherent system, and thus to disclose the 
causal ground of the whole. This is a line of 
inquiry distinct from and transcending the field 
of the special sciences. 

A third criticism passed on positivism is that 
it fails to provide for that ground and connection 
of things which the human mind demands. This 
demand is not confined to metaphysical spectla- 
tion; it is implicit in all science. Science assumes 


42 PRESENT (LENDENGIPS is 


a real connection between things; and to deny 
this connection, to rule out the ideas of cause 
and substance, is to undermine science itself. 
Science need not concern itself with the nature of 
this causal bond; that problem belongs to meta- 
physics. But that there is such a causal bond is 
implicit in all scientific thinking. Wauthout it we 
would have a groundless becoming, existence 
would be reduced to a Heraclitic flow; and this 
is a conception in which the human mind cannot 
rest. “Causal inquiry,’ as Bowne says, “though 
driven out with a fork, has always come running 
back and always will.’*3 Nature is too strong 
for the positivist. Positivism, indeed, is only a 
form of intellectual asceticism or mortification 
resorted to now and then by the human spirit 
as a kind of penitence for the occasional over- 
indulgence of its cognitive impulse. As a re- 
action, for instance, against absolute idealism it 
is quite intelligible; but it constitutes no per- 
manent resting place for the human spirit. It 
is at best a half-way house, and must even- 
tually give way again to metaphysics. For the 
present, however, it represents the dominant secu- 
lar mood, and its apparent alliance with science 
gives to it great influence and prestige. It is 
positivistic science that is to-day the great intel- 
lectual foe of religion. Agnosticism and atheism 


“Personalism, Preface, p. vii, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 43 


follow in its train. For this science itself is not 
directly responsible, but that the modern scien- 
tific movement has encouraged the rise of the 
positivistic type of thought is manifest. 

The second respect in which modern science 
has come into conflict with religion is in tending 
to dethrone man from that central place in the 
universe which he had previously been supposed 
to occupy. The traditional Christian view of the 
world was both geocentric and anthropocentric. 
The earth was regarded not only as the center 
and main part of the universe but as having its 
end and explanation in man. “Just as man,” 
said Peter Lombard, “is made for the sake of 
God—that is, that he may serve him—so the 
universe is made for the sake of man—that is, 
that it may serve him; therefore is man placed 
at the middle point of the universe, that he may 
both serve and be served.” The geocentric and 
anthropocentric standpoint was thus wrought in- 
to the very structure of Christian thought. In- 
deed, it formed the background of the whole 
divine drama of creation and redemption. It 
came, then, as a rude shock to Christian faith, 
when at the very beginning of the modern era 
science promulgated what is known as the Coper- 
nican astronomy. The very foundations of 
Christian theology seemed to be undermined by 
the new theory. For if the earth is not the center 


44 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


of the universe but simply a comparatively small 
body revolving around the sun, and if there are 
countless other solar systems as large as ours. 
what reasonable ground can there be for believ- 
ing that man occupies any such central place in 
the divine thought and plan as is implied in the 
Christian system? Would it not seem that on 
this theory man as well as the earth is reduced 
to utter instgnificance? 

At the very outset there was thus a sharp clash 
between modern science and religion. The two 
seemed to be at complete variance in their esti- 
mate of man. And the sense of disparity between 
them on this point has not yet completely van- 
ished. But the initial tension created by the pro- 
mulgation of the Copernican astronomy gradu- 
ally relaxed. Christian theology slowly adjusted 
itself to the new theory. It did so by stressing 
the fact that it is not mere bulk or size that con- 
stitutes worth. From the spatial point of view 
man may be an altogether insignificant being, but 
from the standpoint of value the situation is en- 
tirely different. No matter what may be said 
in the Copernican astronomy about the immensi- 
ties of space, “in the world there is nothing great 
but man, and in man there is nothing great but 
mind.” Man’s possession of mind, of intelli- 
gence, sets him on high above those “two great 
intimidating phantoms’’—space and time—and 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 45 


restores to him again that primacy which he had 
enjoyed in earlier times. , 

But hardly had this line of thought brought - 
about a fairly comfortable modus vivendi between 
modern science and religion, when the Christian 
estimate of man received another rude shock. 
This time it came from the field of biology. The 
Darwinian theory of man’s descent seemed at 
first to destroy that very claim to spiritual pre- 
eminence and unique worth which had made pos- 
sible a reconciliation between Christian faith and 
the Copernican astronomy. For man, we were 
now told, is genealogically related to the lower 
animals. There is no such gulf separating the 
human from the animal world as was formerly 
supposed. The magic word “evolution” has 
bound them together. Man now comes into the 
world trailing, not clouds of glory, but a brute 
ancestry. There is in him no divine spark that 
assures to him a unique destiny. His entire ~ 
nature is of the earth earthy. 

This “second degradation” that man has suf- 
fered at the hands of modern science seemed at 
the outset even more serious than the first, and 
another clash between faith and science resulted. 
At first Christian apologists thought it their duty 
to dispute the new scientific theory, and some 
still operate on that basis. But on the whole 
wiser counsels have prevailed. Philosophie criti- 


46 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


cism has shown that it is not the scientific doc- 
trine of evolution that faith has to fear but only 
a materialistic interpretation of it. Evolution 
may be regarded as either causal or modal. In 
the former sense it is simply a materialistic philos- 
ophy, and as such is exposed to all those criti- 
cisms which have justly brought that type of 
thought into disrepute. In the latter sense it is 
merely a mode or law of operation, and as such is 
perfectly consistent with a theistic and Christian 
view of the world. Evolution as such creates 
nothing. The question as to the origin and des- 
tiny of man’s soul is, therefore, quite independent 
of the question as to his pedigree. Souls in any 
case are not actually transmitted from parents to 
children. If real at all, they owe their origin 
to the divine power that maintains the present 
world order; they come from God who is their 
home. It is then a matter of indifference whether 
the Darwinian theory of man’s descent is correct 
or not. There is in the theory nothing that neces- 
sarily conflicts with the Christian faith. Such is 
the line of thought adopted by our current apolo- 
getics, and that it is logically sound can hardly be 
gainsaid. But, on the other hand, it can hardly 
be denied that the modern scientific atmosphere 
is not altogether favorable to the religious and 
Christian estimate of man. “For a hundred and 
fifty years past,” as William James says, “the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, | © 47 


progress of science has seemed to mean the en- 
largement of the material universe and the dimi- 
nution of man’s importance. The result is what 
one may call the growth of naturalistic and posi- 
tivistic feeling. . . . Ideals appear as inert by- 
products of physiology.”'4 So, whatever logic 
may say, the Christian faith in the unique dignity 
and immortal destiny of man, though able to 
maintain itself in the modern thought world, is 
nevertheless forced to struggle against adverse 
— conditions. 

The third point of conflict between modern 
science and religion is found in the idea of the 
reign of law. By its stress on this idea science 
has tended to discredit the biblical miracles and 
to destroy faith in Providence and in answers 
to prayer. There was, of course, in the ancient 
and Christian world some notion of the uni- 
formity of nature. But people of that day had 
no conception of a fixed system of natural law. 
Miracles were regarded as not uncommon events ; 
at least they created no problem for thought. 
Even the greatest of the church Fathers, such as 
Origen and Augustine, credited the most fan- 
tastic stories of magical and demonic agency in 
the world. But all this was changed with the 
advent of modern natural science. Law and 
necessity now became supreme. Nature was 


“Pragmatism, p. 16. 


45 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


erected into a vast mechanical system operating 
by virtue of forces resident within itself. These 
forces were regarded as absolutely fixed and de- 
termined by law. They moved with unerring 
precision, and left no place for miracles and 
answers to prayer. If such events actually oc- 
curred, they were due to violations of natural 
law, to direct divine interpositions. And with 
the progress of science such interpositions were 
less and less needed to explain the known facts 
of life. Hence there was an inevitable tendency 
to discredit all reports of miracles, whether bibli- 
cal or extrabiblical, and to see in nature a fixed 
order with which no will can interfere. 

This rigid and dogmatic view of nature is es- 
sentially materialistic, and so has gradually 
succumbed to the criticisms that have under- 
mined materialism itself. But while the neces- 
sitarian and dogmatic element is less prominent 
in the current scientific view of nature, and while 
less stress is laid on the rationality and systematic 
totality of the physical universe than heretofore, 
the belief in the reign of law is as firmly estab- 
lished as ever. Law is not regarded as a neces- 
sity of the constitution of things in the way it 
was. Under the influence of the positivistic ten- 
dency of recent times nature has lost something 
of its rigidity. Itthas in the thought of our day 
become more plastic. It is viewed as to some 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 49 


extent a living and growing thing. New ele- 
ments and new departures are not necessarily ex- 
cluded from it. This holds true even of the 
view held by naturalistic thinkers, and fits in, 
of course, harmoniously with the current theistic 
conception of the divine immanence. God does 
not need to change the course of nature in order 
to answer prayer. Nature is no longer regarded 
as a self-running mechanism. God can intro- 
duce new factors into it and work out his own 
purposes through it without interfering with the 
essential uniformity of its laws. Miracles, too, 
from this point of view cease to be interposi- 
tions from without. They represent simply the 
unusual in the divine procedure. The natural 
is the familiar, and the miraculous the unfamiliar. 
One is as dependent on the divine causality as the 
other. There is, then, nothing impossible or ir- 
rational in the idea of miracle. Even the posi- 
tivist would admit this. 

The reign of law, therefore, contains no neces- 
sary obstacle to faith. Rather has it become one 
of the great evidences of the intelligence of the 
world ground. Order is the natural and neces- 
sary form under which the divine reason ex- 
presses itself. So generally has this idea come to 
be accepted that it is possible for one of our 
most distinguished Christian thinkers to say that 
“the undivineness of the natural and the un- 


50 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


naturalness of the divine is the great heresy of 
popular thought respecting religion.’® 

But while the mechanical view of nature has 
thus been weakened, and while the abstract possi- 
bility of miracle is more widely conceded than 
was the case a generation ago, the question still 
remains open as to whether miracles actually do 
occur or ever did occur. And under the pressure 
of scientific teaching the manifest tendency in re- 
ligious thought is to lay less stress than heretofore 
on the fact of miracle. Whether miracles occur 
in our time or not, has clearly no vital relation 
to our religious faith. If God is the ever-present 
cause of the existing world order, that is all we 
need. The only respect in which the question of 
miracles has any serious significance for us is 
in its bearing on the historicity of the Gospels. 
And here the tendency is to detach the essential 
truth of Christianity from all necessary de- 
pendence upon the gospel miracles. Indeed, 
many Christian thinkers reject altogether the 
miraculous element in Scripture. They may ad- 
mit that Jesus in a marvelous way healed the 
sick, but these acts they do not regard as strictly 
miraculous. The real miracles—the so-called 
nature-miracles—such as the raising of the dead, 
the walking on the water, and the feeding of 
the five thousand, they regard as mythical or 


“B. P. Bowne, The Immanence of God, Preface. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Pe 


legendary. Now,'this tendency is manifestly hav- 
ing a serious effect on traditional Christian be- 
lief; and the full consequences of it have not yet 
been wrought out. Our conception of the divin- 
ity and authority of Christ will necessarily be 
profoundly affected by it. 

It is, then, evident that the modern scientific 
movement has had a very important bearing on 
religious faith. It has encouraged the rise of 
materialistic and positivistic philosophies which 
by their very nature have sought to eliminate the 
idea of God; it has by its astronomical and bio- 
logical theories tended to dethrone man from that 
central place of dignity and worth ascribed to 
him by the Christian faith; and by its stress 
on the reign of law it has in no small measure 
tended to destroy the credibility of scriptural 
history. These are in the main the consequences 
of science in its theoretical aspect. But science 
has also its practical character. It is a faith as 
well as a theory. And as a faith it manifests it- 
self, as we have seen, in the belief in social 
progress and in the dominant socio-economic in- 
terest of our day. We pass, therefore, to a con- 
sideration of these other factors in our modern 
thought world. 


THE BELIEF IN SOCIAL PROGRESS 


The belief in social progress stands in a double 


52 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


' relation to science, and this double relation rep- 
resents two different conceptions of progress. 
The first of these conceptions is naturalistic. 
According to it social progress is a law of nature, 
and as such is simply a specification under the 
more general law of cosmic and biological evo- 
lution. Evolution is one of the great ideas of 
modern times. Correctly understood, it has to 
do only with the phenomenal order. It is purely 
descriptive in nature. But, like other scientific 
laws, it has been interpreted causally as a neces- 
sity inherent in the constitution of things. Ac- 
cording to this interpretation, development be- 
longs to the very structure of reality, and social 
progress as a part of the general evolutionary 
movement is unavoidable. It has about it all the 
certainty and inevitableness of a scientific law. 
Herbert Spencer, for instance, says: “Progress 
is not an accident but a necessity. What we call 
evil and immorality must disappear. It is cer- 
tain that man must become perfect.’ Again he 
says: ‘“‘The ultimate development of the ideal 
man is certain—as certain as any conclusion in 
which we place the most implicit faith; for in- 
stance, that all men will die.” And J. B. Bury 
declares that “the process must be the necessary 
outcome of the psychical and social nature of 
man; it must not be at the mercy of any external 
will; otherwise there would be no guarantee of 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 53 


its continuance and its issue, and the idea of 
Progress would lapse into the idea of Provi- 
dence.’’*® But this idea of progress as a certainty 
and a necessity is, as John Morley says, a “super- 
stition—the most splendid and animated supersti- 
tion, if we will, yet a superstition after all.” “It 
often deepens,” he adds, “into a kind of fatalism, 
radiant, confident, and infinitely hopeful, yet fatal- 
ism still, and, like fatalism in all its forms, 
fraught with inevitable peril, first to the effective 
sense of individual responsibilty, and then to the 
successful working of principles and institutions 
of which that responsibility is the vital sap.’??7 
There is then no warrant for the view that social 
progress is an objective law, a scientific certainty. 
This conception of progress is a conclusion drawn 
from a naturalistic and necessitarian philosophy, 
and would, if generally accepted, destroy the very 
conditions of progress. Yet for a century and a 
half past it has been current and has exercised 
a wide influence. It has been regarded as a sub- 
stitute both for the doctrine of providence and 
the hope of a future life) 

The other conception of progress may be desig- 
nated as ethical. According to it social progress 
is a conquest, not a bequest; it is a task, not a 

*The Idea of Progress, p. 5. 


"Miscellanies (Fourth Series), p. 293. See also A. 
J. Todd, Theories of Social Progress, p. 105. 


54 PRESENT TENDENCIES *IN 


gift; it is contingent, not necessary. What guar- 
antees it is not the truth but the utility of science. 
Science does not reveal progress as a law of 
nature; it furnishes the means by which it may be 
achieved. The ethical conception of progress 
thus differs from the naturalistic in that it is 
based on the practical rather than the theoretical 
side of modern science. It is linked with prag- 
matism, not with dogmatic necessitarianism. But 
it is not on that account held with any less con- 
fidence and enthusiasm. A. J. Balfour is no 
doubt right in saying that progressive civilization 
“fs a tender habit, difficult to propagate, not diffi- 
cult to destroy, that refuses to flourish except in 
a soil which is not to be fouhfd everywhere, nor 
at all times, nor even, so far as we can see, neces- 
sarily to be found at all.’1® But difficult as it 
may be to achieve, there is the utmost confidence 
that modern science has placed indefinite social 
progress within our grasp. This confidence has 
been, as Morley says, “the mainspring of Liber- 
alism in all its schools and branches,” and is, as 
Bury says, “the animating and controlling idea 
of Western civilization.” “That the control of 
nature,” says, R. B. Perry, “through the advance- 
ment of knowledge is the instrument of progress 
and the chief ground of hope, is the axiom of 
modern civilization. ... The good is to be won 


“Essays and Addresses, p. 244. 


reat i ht ie 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT ee 


by the race and for the race; it lies in the future, 
and can result only from prolonged and collective 
endeavor; and the power to achieve it lies in the 
progressive knowledge and control of nature.” 
The result is that “man now greets the future 
with a new and unbounded hopefulness. Indeed, 
this faith in the power of life to establish and 
magnify itself through the progressive mastery of 
its environment, is the most significant religious 
idea of modern times.’’?” 

Such is the nature and temper of the modern 
belief in social progress. The belief itself 1n its 
ethical form does not contain anything that is 
necessarily at variance with the fundamental doc- 
trines of historic Christianity. The gradual 
improvement of the external conditions of life 
through science and human initiative is not neces- 
sarily inconsistent with the belief in providence, 
nor is the expectation that a terrestrial millen- 
nium will ultimately be established in this way, 
necessarily out of harmony with the belief in a 
life to come. Doctrinally the theological and the 
modern social standpoints can be adjusted to each 
other; the idea of the divine immanence makes 
this possible. But while this is true, the tone and 
temper of the two standpoints is manifestly quite 
different. The current belief in social progress is 
largely secular in character, and stresses the 


*Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 4f., 47. 


56 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


human factor to the neglect, if not the exclusion, 
of the divine. Its interest thus moves in a dif- 
ferent groove from the distinctively religious, 
and, insofar as it tends to regard itself as self- 
sufficient, it encourages human pride and self- 
satisfaction. It also emphasizes external and 
this-worldly considerations, and so comes into 
conflict with the inwardness of Christianity and 
its stress on the eternal and the ideal. 

Then, too, the modern outlook into the future 
is quite different from that of historical Chris- 
tianity. In order properly to appreciate this dif- 
ference it may be well to direct attention to the 
fact that as regards the future there have been 
three different and successive world-views. 

First, there was the ancient belief in a series 
of world-cycles. According to this belief the 
universe passes through one cycle after another. 
Each cycle is an exact repetition of those that have 
preceded. There is, therefore, no progress, no 
development. “That which hath been is that 
which shall be; and that which hath been done 
is that which shall be done: and there is nothing 
new under the sun’ (Eccles. 1. 9). 

This was the prevailing view in the ancient 
heathen world, and it was by way of contrast with 
it that the apocalyptic hope of the Jews arose. 
According to this hope the present cycle would 
come to an end, would come to an end sooner 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 37 


than the heathen expected, but when it came to an 
end, there would not be another cycle similar to it. 
Instead there would be a mighty divine interven- 
tion. An altogether new world-order would be 
established. ‘“‘Behold, I create new heavens and 
a new earth: and the former things shall not be 
remembered, nor come into mind” (Isa. 65. 17). 
This outlook formed the intellectual background 
of both the Old and New Testaments, and by 
way of contrast with the belief in a series of 
world-cycles represented a distinct advance. It 
was optimistic, it asserted the moral government 
of the world, it predicted the final triumph of the 
right. But while this is true, it remained essen- 
tially pessimistic with reference to the present 
world-order. It did not look forward to the 
gradual improvement of existing social condi- 
tions. At first the end was regarded as too immi- 
nent to leave time for such improvement, and 
after the belief in the imminence of Christ’s re- 
turn was generally given up, conditions did not 
favor the rise of the social hope. The earlier pes- 
simistic view consequently continued. Not until 
modern times did the third world-view, the be- 
lief in social progress, arise. 

This view is now dominant. People generally 
to-day look forward to an indefinite period of de- 
velopment for mankind on earth. In this out- 
look there is, as has already been pointed out, 


538 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


nothing that contradicts any fundamental Chris- 
tian doctrine, but there is in it a rather sharp 
divergence from the traditional Christian escha- 
tology. And some people see here a radical 
difference of standpoint. Franz Overbeck, for 
instance, declares that “the contradiction be- 
tween the old Christian eschatology and the 
present attitude toward the future is fundamen- 
tal and probably the ultimate cause of the 
fact that the present is at complete variance 
with Christianity.”*° This statement is mani- 
festly too strong. The modern world and 
Christianity are not at complete variance with 
each other. The old Christian eschatology, at 
least so far as it has to do with the apocalyptic 
hope, is not to be identified with the Christian 
faith. The Christian faith in its essential nature 
is independent of it. Hence it is quite possible 
to adjust Christianity to the modern social hope. 
Indeed, on the part of scholars the adjustment 


has been to a large degree effected. But while | 


this is true, there is an undeniable disparity be- 
tween the New-Testament outlook into the future 
and that of to-day. To say with Schweitzer that 
because of his apocalyptic viewpoint the historical 
Jesus is “to our time a stranger and an enigma,” 
is, of course, an extravagance. But that there is 


a real difficulty for faith at this point is evident | 


*Christentum und Kultur, p. 66. 


ee ee ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 59 


to all. Historic Christianity and the modern be- 
lief in social progress are not altogether har- 
monious with each other. There is still more or 
less of conscious tension between them, and in 
the process of adjusting the one to the other both 
Christian belief and the Christian life are under- 
going significant modifications. What these 
modifications are will come up for discussion in 
a later chapter. 


THE Socro-EcoNOMIC INTEREST 


We now pass to a consideration of the third 
distinctive factor in the modern thought world, 
the socio-economic interest. This interest in its 
characteristic modern form arose somewhat later 
than the belief in progress. The immediate 
cause of its rise is to be found in two revolu-— 
tions, namely, the industrial revolution in Eng- 
land and the contemporaneous political and in- 
tellectual revolution in France. 

The latter stimulated social interest in several 
different ways. First, it set before the world a 
new political and social ideal, embodied in the 
famous watchword, “Liberty, Equality, Frater- 
nity.’ Secondly, the great changes wrought by 
the French Revolution impressed men with the 
plasticity of society. Society is not an external 
fatality to which men must submit, as had pre- 
viously been supposed; it is something that can 


60 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


be shaped and reshaped by human volition. In 
the third place, the terrible destruction occasioned 
by the Revolution awakened in men the feeling 
that society must be studied and its laws mastered 
so that in the future it will be possible to avoid 
a repetition of such a catastrophe. 

The English industrial revolution, on the other 
hand, brought about by the introduction of 
machinery, resulted in an enormous increase in 
production. This naturally led men to place a 
new emphasis on the economic factor in human 
life, and at the same time encouraged the hope 
that a new age of ease and comfort was about 
to be ushered in through man’s inventive genius. 
But this hope soon received a rude shock. The 
factory system gave rise to great evils. The 
workmen found themselves in a new bondage. 
They had less economic security and less oppor- 
tunity for self-expression than even serfs had 
been accustomed to. Often they were treated as 
mere tools, to be cast aside whenever convenience 
or caprice might so dictate; and the wealth, which 
they were producing, they shared in only meager- 
ly. The inevitable result was a growing con- 
viction that there was something wrong with the 
existing economic and social order. Political 
liberty was seen to be of little value without a 
more equitable distribution of the products of in- 
dustry. Interest thus began to center in economic 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 61 


conditions. Economic ills came to be regarded 
as fundamental in human society; if they were 
removed, most of the other social ills would 
vanish also. And that these socio-economic evils 
can be removed has gradually become the faith 
of multitudes. The existing economic system, 
they believe, has nothing final about it. Men 
made it, and what they have made they can un- 
make. So to-day to an unprecedented degree men 
are devoting their attention to social and economic 
problems. 

This does not mean that in earlier times—in 
antiquity, for instance—there was no “social” or 
“economic” interest. Economic matters have al- 
ways to some extent engaged the attention of 
men. The very conditions of human existence 
make this necessary. But among the ancients the 
economic sphere was not valued in principle as 
it is with us. Wealth was not regarded as a 
necessary condition of civilization; no special im- 
portance was attributed to it in the cultural life 
of men, nor was it looked upon as a determining 
factor in human history. To-day, however, it 
occupies a significant and worthy place in the 
life and thought of men. Poverty is no longer 
idealized, the value of the acquisitive instinct is 
generally recognized, and the importance of pro- 
ductive labor is emphasized. The economic in- 
terest has thus received a recognition in modern 


62 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


times that it did not have in antiquity. And the 
same is also true of the “social’’ interest. The 
ancients were, of course, aware of the social 
aspects of htman life. They knew that men live 
in necessary relations with each other. But they 
viewed this fact chiefly from the ethical stand- 
point. They regarded it as man’s duty to be so- 
cial; they did not fully realize that he by nature 
is such. It is the latter idea that is character- 
istic of our day. “If there is one truth,” says 
W. H. Sheldon, “which may be called peculiarly 
modern, it is the truth that man is a socius.”21 
The social factor is constitutive in human life. 
Man would not be man without it. It is in this 
sense that society may be said to be a modern dis- 
covery. It is now recognized, as it was not here- 
tofore, that man is essentially a social being, that 
his life is largely determined by this fact, and that 
the proper organization of society is, therefore, 
a matter of paramount importance. 

The social and economic interests, which have 
thus been developed in a unique way in modern 
times, do not necessarily imply each other. The 
economic interest might exist without the social, 
and often does; and the social interest might 
exist without special stress on the economic. That 
the two have been to such a large extent com- 
bined in our day is more or less of an accident, 


“Strife of Systems and Productive Duality, p. 16. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT - 63 


due to the peculiar conditions created by the 
French Revolution, on the one hand, and the in- 
dustrial revolution on the other. Then, too, 
the modern capitalistic system both by its stress 
on profits and by the social evils incident thereto 
has tended to keep the two interests together. 
These interests are at present pervasive. Vir- 
tually every class of society is affected one way 
or the other by them. But they have received 
their most highly specialized expression in two 
movements, namely, socialism and the science of 
sociology. 

The latter, founded by Auguste Comte, is still 
in a more or less amorphous state. It has no 
established doctrines. But its most typical and 
influential representatives tend to make society in 
a certain sense the supreme reality. It is soci- 
ety, according to their theory, that creates the 
categories of, thought; it is society that imposes 
on men moral obligations; it is society that gen- 
erates those ideals or eternal values that con- 
stitute the essence of religion. Religion, moral- 
ity, and reason itself are inexplicable apart from 
society. It is within society and only within it 
that they find their meaning and explanation.. 
Everything, according to this sociological theory, 
is thus subordinated to the social concept. The 
individual as such, his reason, his conscience, his 
religious faith have no independent worth or sig- 


64 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


nificance. And since society is at best a tem- 
poral being, all individuals with their hopes and 
their ideals will eventually sink into nothingness. 
Sociological speculation thus ends in irreligion, 
in atheism, or agnosticism. 

Socialism in its dominant form, as represented 
by Karl Marx, claims to be “scientific”; but as 
a matter fact it is primarly an organized political 
and economic movement. It is a faith, a pro- 
gram, a dogma, and is more closely akin to re- 
ligion than to science. It agrees in a general way 
with sociology in the dominant influence assigned 
to society.2?_ But it emphasizes, as general soci- 
ology does not, the theory of class-struggle. For 
Marx and Engels this theory was “the master 
key of human history.”?3 ‘The whole history 
of mankind,” said Engels, “has been a history of 
class-struggles, contests between exploiting and 
exploited, ruling and oppressed classes,” and “the 
history of these class-struggles forms a series of 
evolution in which nowadays a stage has been 
reached where the exploited and oppressed class 
cannot attain its emancipation without, at the same 


“Marx, for instance, says, “It is not the conscious- 
ness of men that determines their existence, but, on the 
contrary, their social existence determines their con- 
sciousness.” 

“See J. E. Le Rossignol, What is Socialism? pp. 
182ff. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 6s 


time, and once for all, emancipating society at 
large from all exploitation, oppression, class dis- 
tinctions, and class-struggles.’’?4 This theory, it 
is manifest, is not an induction based on an ob- 
jective study of historical facts; it is simply an 
attempt to justify and promote the expected pro- 
letarian revolution. It is not, then, a sociological 
theory in the strict scientific sense of the term; 
it is, rather, a preamble to a political platform. 
The same is also to be said of the materialistic 
Or economic interpretation of history which is 
basal in the Marxian system. Of this doctrine 
Enrico Ferri says that it “is truly the most scien- 
tific and the most prolific sociological theory that 
has ever been discovered by the genius of 
man. ... Just as psychology is an effect of phys- 
iology, so the moral phenomena are effects of 
economic facts... . This is the sublime concep- 
tion, the fact-founded and scientific Marxian the- 
ory, which fears no criticism, resting, as it does, 
on the best-established results of geology and 
biology, of psychology and sociology.’”?5 The 
fact, however, is that this theory involves a gross 
exaggeration of the importance of the economic 
factor in human history. To make morality 
and religion mere by-products of the struggle for 
class supremacy, a struggle that is fundamentally 


“Preface to Communist Manifesto, p. 8. 
*Socialism and Modern Science, pp. 1636. 


66 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


economic in character, is to belie the manifest 
facts of life. Such a theory has no place in sci- 
entific sociology. It is simply a partisan creed 
designed to release the proletariat from all re- 
straints of conscience and religion in their 
struggle to achieve their political and economic 
ends. But whatever may have been the primary 
motive of the theory and however inadequate may 
be its scientific basis, it is orthodox socialist doc- 
trine; and as such it is intimately connected with 
an aggressive political and economic propaganda. 
This fact gives to it a significance that it might 
not otherwise have. The theory is, of course, 
based on a materialistic philosophy, and implies 
that all religion is an illusion. “Religion,” says 
Marx, “‘is the striving of the people for an imag- 
inary happiness; it springs from a state of society 
that requires an illusion, but disappears when the 
recognition of true happiness and the possibility 
of its realization penetrates the masses.’’*® 
Socialism, it is no doubt true, is not neces- 
sarily tied up to the materialism of Marx, and 
sociology likewise has no necessary connection 
with the positivism of Comte. The theories held 
by these men and their followers relative to the 
dominant influence of society and the economic 
factor in human life are extreme. Socialists and 


“Quoted by August Bebel, Woman*and Socialism, pp. 
4371. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 67 


sociologists as a whole by no means accept them. 
But in a more moderate form they are widely 
held. They are not confined to any group or 
groups of people, but represent the common 
thought of our day. That the life of the indi- 
vidual is largely determined by his social environ- 
ment has become almost axiomatic; and so al- 
so is the idea that economic considerations are 
usually the most powerful factors in determining 
the conduct of nations, of social groups, and of 
individuals. The result is that the appeal of re- 
ligion to the individual does not carry the weight 
that it once did. It is the group idea that is now 
attractng the attention of men. We talk about 
“classes” and “forces” and “‘movements,” but 
what becomes of the individual, his worth, and his 
destiny are to a large extent left out of account. 
And that this means a weakening and impover- 
ishment of the religious life is painfully evident 
to every one who has been accustomed to breath- 
ing the atmosphere of the New Testament. Then, 
too, the economic emphasis of our time has tended 
to depress that ethical idealism that constitutes 
the very essence of spiritual religion. Ideal 
motives are on every hand discounted. ‘Either 
their existence or their effectiveness and adap- 
tability to mundane conditions is denied, We are 
witnessing about us a decay of life, and this 
decay is due in no small measure to the fact that 


68 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


people have adopted what Bertrand Russell calls 
“the religion of material goods.” They worship 
money and find in the outside world the one great 
source of happiness. The inevitable consequence 
is that the inner life is undergoing disintegra- 
tion, and there is a decline of faith in the immor- 
tal destiny of the spirit and in its power to triumph 
over the world. 

In the socio-economic interest of our day there 
is, then, a grave peril to true religion. In its more 
extreme form this interest is entirely subversive 
of religious faith; and in its more moderate form 
it acts as a devitalizing influence on it. Both 
Christian belief and the Christian life are pro- 
foundly affected by it; and only the future can 
tell what its permanent effects on historic Chris- 
tianity will be. 


In the analysis and survey of the modern 
thought world, to which this chapter has been 
devoted, we have observed that there are cer- 
tain powerful tendencies that are hostile to religion 
and that aim at destroying its fundamental beliefs. 
These tendencies are represented by the material- 
istic philosophies, the positivistic philosophies, 
and those sociological theories that treat religion 
as an illusion created by society in its own interest. 
Materialism denies the existence of God, posi- 
tivism denies the possibility of knowing him even 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 69 


if he exists, and the anti-religious forms of so- 
ciology and socialism seek to show how such 
illusory beliefs as those in God and immortality 
arose. Along with these anti-religious theories 
and philosophies there are also in the modern 
thought world, as we have seen, other theories 
and beliefs that have had at least a disturbing 
effect on the Christian faith in its traditional 
form. Here we may mention the Copernican as- 
tronomy, the Darwinian theory of man’s descent, 
the universal reign of law, and the idea of social 
progress. These ideas are not necessarily incon- 
sistent with the basal conceptions of religion, 
but they have profoundly affected the Christian 
conception of the authority and historicity of 
Scripture, and by many they have been re- 
garded as subversive of the Christian faith 
altogether. 

Then, in addition to these forces in the modern 
thought world that are either hostile to religion 
or that have had a seriously disturbing effect upon 
religious thought, there is, as we have pointed 
out, the positive fact that in modern times the 
effort has been and is being made to find a sub- 
stitute for religion. Instead of the belief in God 
and immortality we are told to place our faith 
in science, in social progress, and in the material 
welfare of men. We are not to look forward to 
a future heaven, but stake our all on the estab- 


70 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


lishment of an earthly paradise. That some such 
goal is possible as the result of the scientific con- 
trol of nature is, we are told, “the most signifi- 
cant religious idea of modern times.” But this 
idea, accepted as a finality, manifestly implies the 
surrender of religion in its historic form. _So 
Christianity 1s to-day confronted not only with 
hostile and disturbing theories and philosophies 


but also with a rival faith. And how to meet. 


these alien currents in the modern thought world 
is a problem that will tax to the utmost the re- 
sources of Christianity. ‘ 

Not since the first three or four centuries of 
our era has Christianity faced so grave a crisis 
as at the present time. Then it was necessary to 
transplant the Christian faith from Hebraic to 
Gentile soil, to make what had been a religion of 
Syrian peasants the religion of Greek philos- 
ophers. The process was an extremely difficult 
and perilous one. That the transplanting was 
effected without radically injuring Christianity 
itself is almost a miracle of history. Marvelously 
those early Christian thinkers, taken as a whole, 
appropriated what was of value in the dominant 
philosophy of the time, and thus accommodated 
Christianity to its new intellectual environment 
without surrendering its distinctive character. 
To-day the situation is equally difficult and 
equally perilous. Christianity at present is being 


ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 71 


transplanted from the medizval to the modern 
thought world. With us the standard of truth is 
found, not in Greek philosophy, but in modern 
science. Science is anti-authoritarian; it is both 
empirical and rationalistic; and it is also utili- 
tarian. These, then, are the scientific tests of 
truth: experience, reason, utility. To these tests 
religion must submit, if it is to orient itself in the 
modern world. But can it successfully meet these 
tests? 

In view of the complexity of the situation and 
the complexity of Christianity itself it is not sur- 
prising that the most diverse answers to this ques- 
tion should be given. Some think that there is 
a radical and necessary antithesis between re- 
ligion and science; so in this group some reject 
religion and some science. Others hold that re- 
ligion and science can be brought into accord with 
each other, but they follow the same method as 
did the Gnostics of old. They surrender the dis- 
tinctive character of Christianity to what they 
regard as the demands of contemporary thought, 
or they so radically modify its nature as to de- 
prive it of its pristine power. These people talk 
much about the “religious revolution” through 
which we are supposed to be passing. Even so 
sober a thinker as ‘C. A. Ellwood tells us that “a 
New Reformation is necessary within the Chris- 
tian Church if it is to survive, beside which the 


pe 


72 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


Protestant Reformation will seem insignificant.”?7 
The actual change that he proposes does not turn 
out to be so serious as this preliminary announce- 
ment might lead one to expect. But others go 
so far as to transform Christianity into a mere 
humanitarianism; in deference to  positivistic 
science they surrender both God and immortality. 
Then there are others, less radical, who are trying 
to assure Christianity a place in the modern world 
by means of various foreign alliances, alliances 
with sociology, with politics, with therapeutics. 
“Silly doves, without understanding,” the prophet 
Hosea would have called them. We cannot to- 
day sustain a decaying faith, any more than the 
ancient Israelites could a decaying state, by ex- 
ternal props. Christianity must maintain its own 
integrity and find its justification in itself, or 
cease to be. And that in the present crisis it will 
in this respect prove no less successful than in 
its ancient conflict with Greek philosophy, we 
have every reason to believe. Instead of itself 
yielding to the adverse influences of our time it 
will yet show itself strong enough to take the 
modern thought world by the rims, shake out of 
it its naturalism and its heathenism, and then 
make of the residuum a foundation on which to 
build its own conquering faith. Exactly how this 
will be done no one can say in detail. But the 


“The Reconstruction of Religion, p. 1, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 73 


main lines along which the Christian religion has 
been and is adjusting itself to modern science and 
at the same time making science tributary to its 
own purposes, will be pointed out and discussed in 
the following chapters. 


74 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


CHAPTER ‘II 


THE PROBLEM OF -BIBLIGAL 
AUTHORITY 


MopeERN thought is autonomous. It is a law 
unto itself. It recognizes no supernatural stand- 
ard of truth, no external authority superior to 
the human mind. It finds in experience, reason, 
and utility the sole sources of truth. What lies 
beyond them or contradicts them is devoid of all 
claim to verity. It is an illusory product of the 
imagination, no matter how hoary it may be with 
age and how well attested it may be by tradition. 
Mere age and tradition guarantee nothing. 
Everything old as well as everything new must 
stand the acid test either of logic or of observa- 
tion and experiment before it can be accepted as 
irue. No belief can be validated by appeal to 
the authority of an institution or a book. The 
ultimate test of truth must be found within the 
mind itself. Experience and reason are self- 
verifying. They stand in their own right. They 
acknowledge no masters. On the contrary, they 
claim authority over all the sacred beliefs and 
institutions of the past. None of these are im- 
mune from criticism and skepticism. Descartes, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 76 


for instance, the founder of modern philosophy, 
began his search after truth by doubting every- 
thing that he could. He found it possible to 
doubt the existence of God and that of the ma- 
terial world. Finally, however, he came upon 
one indubitable reality—the fact of his own ex- 
istence; and then upon this as a basis he pro- 
ceeded by logical processes to erect his own sys- 
tem of thought. The completed structure had its 
serious defects, but the method employed has 
been commonly regarded as valid. Modern 
thought begins, as did Descartes, with faith in 
man’s unfettered reason; it holds to the auton- 
omy of the human spirit; it is anti-authoritarian. — 

Religion, on the other hand, in its historical 
form is authoritarian in its tendency. For this ~ 
there are two or three manifest reasons. First, 
religion by its very nature is “theonomous” 
rather than autonomous. It finds its source and 
law in God, not in man. It is God-given, not 
man-made. At least this is the conviction of 
the religious consciousness. Religious experience 
assumes the reality of revelation. Without 
revelation there would be no religion. All re- 
ligion is founded on revelation, either real or 
supposed. It is only as the Divine Being or 
beings reveal themselves that we can enter into 
relation with them. Only through revelation can 
we ascertain their will. A real God, a living God, 


76 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


must reveal himself. An wunrevealed God, a 
“Veiled Being,’ would be a nonentity. He 
could not be the basis of a religion. Religion 
implies divine revelation; and divine revelation 
carries with it the idea of authority. When God 
speaks, it is as the voice of Truth and Law. From 
it there is no appeal; nor is there any desire 
to appeal from it on the part of the devout heart. 
The truly devout soul accepts the revealed Word 
of God and bows submissively before his re- 
vealed will. This attitude is inherent in the very 
nature of religion. Religion involves the idea 
of divine authority. 

In the next place religion as an institution re- 
quires the principle of authority. No political ~ 
or social organization would be possible without 
a superindividual or authoritative bond. The 
nature of this bond may be differently conceived 
and the seat of authority may be differently lo- 
cated. Some may be democratic, others aristo- 
cratic, and still others monarchic in their concep- 
tion of authority. But authority there must be 
somewhere. The very idea of social organiza- 
tion and of government implies it. No institu- 
tion could exist on an anarchic basis. An atom- 
istic individualism would mean the dissolution of 
all social groups and of society as a whole. The 
very fact, therefore, that religion is social in 
character and that it inevitably tends to take on 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 77 


an organized form, links it up with the authori- 
tarian principle in human life. 

Cne may, it is true, distinguish between re- 
ligion and organized religion, and try to retain 
the former without the latter. This is a favorite 
idea at present with socialists and other radicals. 
H. G. Wells, for instance, in spite of his apos- 
tolic zeal for the new gospel of the finite God, 
has no place for organized religion. “Religion,” 
he says, “cannot be organized. . . . The Chris- 
tian precedent of a church is particularly mis- 
leading. The church with its sacraments and its 
sacerdotalism is the disease of Christianity. 

. Even such organization as is implied by a 
creed is to be avoided, for all living faith coagu- 


lates as you phrase it. . . . Organization for 
worship and collective exaltation also. . . is of 
little manifest good. . . . God deals only with 


the individual for the individual’s surrender.”* 
But this extreme individualism does violence to 
the true nature of religion. Religion is social. _ 
It is no mere amorphous sentiment. It seeks and 
demands organized expression. All history testi- 
fies to this fact. Unorganized religion is a trun- 
cated and mutilated religion, devoid of vitality 
and propagating power. It is one of the many 
contradictions of our superficial and self-contra- 
dictory age that many of those who emphasize 


God the Invisible King, pp. 162-169. 


78 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


most strongly the need of solidarity and organi- 
zation in life as a whole, deny to them a place 
in the field of religion. This denial is due partly 
to hostility to religion in its traditional form and 
partly to ignorance of what religion really is. It 
manifestly does not grow out of the religious im- 
pulse itself. This impulse, when vigorous and vi- 
tal, inevitably tends toward organization and soli- 
darity. True religion cannot be separated from 
organized religion. The two go together; and 
organized religion, like all other forms of or- 
ganization, implies and requires the exercise of 
authority. 

Then, in the third place, religion has age on its _ 
side, and age creates authority. It is so in the 
life of individuals, and it is so likewise in the 
life of society. The old becomes sacred and 
authoritative. Habit and mental inertia are 
partly responsible for this, but it is due also to 
the weight justly ascribed to experience. Ex- 
perience is constantly. sifting practices and be- 
liefs, and those that last longest presumably have 
something in their favor. At least the average 
mind so argues, and the result is that religion 
by virtue of its age comes to be endowed with an 
altogether unique authority. This authority 
comes to be attached to religious beliefs and 
practices in general, and thus there arises a re- 
ligious tradition that perpetuates itself simply 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 70 


because it is tradition. The authority of tradi- 
tion tends consequently to become a part of re- 
ligi n itself, 

Religion, we thus see, by virtue of its age, its 
social or institutional character, and its claim 
to divine origin, has a natural leaning toward - 
authoritarianism. Science, on the other hand, 
leans quite as naturally in the opposite direction, 
for it is in large part a comparatively recent 
development; it is also individualistic, and it is, 
furthermore, humanistic as distinguished from 
theistic. Hence it is not strange that the conflict 
between religion and science at first centered in 
the problem of authority. Christianity regarded 
it as a question of life and death to maintain 
either the authority of the church or that of the 
Bible; and many still hold this view. Of the 
two forms of authority it is that of the Bible 
with which we in Protestant lands are chiefly 
concerned, and consequently it is it to which our 
attention will for the most part here be directed. 
But before we proceed to its discussion we need 
to inquire briefly into the meaning of authority 
and its different forms. 

“Authority,” says J. W. Sterrett, “may be de- 
fined as the power or influence through which 
one does or believes what he- would not of his 
own unaided powers.”? In this definition noth- 


*The Freedom of Authority, p. 6. 


80 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ing is said about the nature of “the power or 
influence” exercised by authority, whether it be 
rational or coercive. This feature is added by 
Professor Gwatkin, who defines authority as “all 
weight allowed to the beliefs of persons or the 
teachings of institutions beyond their reasonable 
value as personal testimony.”* The expression 
“reasonable value’ suggests a contrast between 
reason and authority. Authority lies’ beyond 
reason and is in a sense opposed to it. This is a 
common view. <A. J. Balfour, for instance, 
speaks of reason as “the rival and opponent of 
authority.” “Authority,” he says, ‘‘is in all cases 
contrasted with reason, and stands for that group 
of non-rational causes, moral, social and educa- 
tional, which produces its results by psychic proc- 
esses other than reasoning.”* This contrast, 
however, implies a narrow view of reason; there 
is a broader view. Besides the strictly logical 
and abstract reason there is a reason implicit in 
those very causes which Balfour calls “irra- 
tional.” There is such a thing as a moral rea- 
son, an esthetic reason, and a religious reason, 
all expressions of a common and unitary reason; 
and in this broader sense of the term “reason’’ 
manifestly constitutes no antithesis to authority. 
Rather is legitimate authority an expression of 
"The Knowledge of God, i, p. 3. 
‘The Foundations of Belief, pp. 203, 227. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 81 


reason. But the word “authority” is used in 
different senses, and these need to be distin- 
guished. 

First, there is the pedagogical form of author- 
ity. This is the type of authority exercised by 
the teacher and the expert. Such authority is a 
permanent necessity in human life. Children 
cannot think for themselves. They accept their 
ideas from others. This also is true of most 
people. The great majority live by hearsay. Ex- 
tremely few attain to intellectual maturity. And 
the few that do have independent sources of in- 
formation only in very limited fields. The great 
body of their knowledge they derive from others. 
They accept it on authority. Knowledge begins 
with faith. This is the rule in human life. We 
never completely transcend it. Not only children 
but people generally to a large extent live on this 
level. They receive their ideas from tradition. 
Tradition is a tutor whose authority we all recog- 
nize, whether we are aware of it or not. Re- 
ligious beliefs come to us in this way, and so 
also other "beliefs. We do not at first reason 
about them, we simply accept them. Later we 
may take a critical attitude toward them. But 
for the growing mind the acceptance of authority 
is the path of progress, and for us all it remains 
an inescapable factor in our mental life. The 
time will never come when we will not need the 


{ 


82 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


authority of the teacher and the specialist. The 
pedagogical form of authority is a psychological 
necessity, and such authority the church as well 
as any established institution may justly claim 
for itself. 

Closely related to this type of authority and 
yet distinguishable from it is authority in the 
sociological sense of the term. Here stress is 
laid not on collective knowledge but on the col- 
lective will. Collective knowledge is the condi- 
tion of the mental development of the individual. 
Of this the teacher takes advantage. It is this 
that gives him his authority. But not only is there 
a collective knowledge which the individual must 
appropriate in order to realize his own nature, 
there is also a collective will to which he must 
submit. This will is embodied in institutions and 
laws, and finds its echo in the individual con- 
science. But whether the individual voluntarily 
responds to it or not, the social or corporate will 
has a way of enforcing its demands. At times 
it may be tyrannical so that the individual revolts 
against it. Emerson, indeed, goes so far as to 
say that “whoso would be a man must be a non- 
conformist.” But this is an extreme statement. 
More could be said in favor of the view that 
only he can be a man who is a conformist. The 
fact is that there is a higher and a lower social 
will and that while the true man may rebel against 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 83 


the latter he always does so in the interest of 
the former. It is this capacity to obey the social 
will that is most characteristic of man. “Though 
it may seem to savor of paradox,” says A. J. 
Balfour, “it is yet no exaggeration to say, that if 
we would find the quality in which we most 
notably excel the brute creation, we should look 
for it, not so much in our faculty of convincing 
and being convinced by the exercise of reasoning, 
as in our capacity for influencing and being in- 
fluenced through the action of authority.’’® It is 
the more or less instinctive and unconscious sub- 
mission of the individual to the authority of the 
group that alone makes human society possible. 
Authority in the form of administrative or 
executive power is a social necessity. No social 
group could exist without it. One cannot, there- 
fore, deny this type of authority to the church, if 
the church has the right to exist at all. Every 
institution, if it is to be efficient, must have the 
power within certain limits to enforce its will 
upon the individual. 

But there is yet another form of authority 
which may, for want of a better word, be de- 
scribed as.epistemological. Authority in this 
form is not simply a guide to the immature rea- 
son or a corrective of the selfish reason but is an 
infallible standard of truth superior to human 


*The Foundations of Belief, p. 238. 


84 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


reason itself. It is, in a word, divine authority. 
Authority in this sense is distinctively religious, 
and is calculated to serve a double purpose. It 
tends to strengthen the power of the church as 
an ecclesiastical organization. The church may, 
as we have seen, justly claim a certain degree of 
authority on pedagogical and __ sociological 
grounds, but this authority is manifestly enor- 
mously augmented by the claim that the church 
is the custodian of infallible truth. By this claim 
ecclesiastical and divine authority are fused to- 
gether, and a basis is thus furnished for an ab- 
solute autocracy. This deification of ecclesiasti- 
cism was repudiated by Protestantism. But in so 
far as the various Protestant churches based 
their distinctive and exclusive tenets upon an 
infallible book they practically claimed for them- 
selves divine authority. The organizational 
weakness in their position consisted in this, that 
they did not, theoretically at least, claim that 
their own interpretation of Scripture was infal- 
lible. However confident they may have been of 
its correctness, they did not feel warranted in 
erecting upon it an ecclesiastical autocracy. In- 
deed, they left the door open to an extreme form 
of democracy such as is represented by the multi- 
tude of Protestant sects. Nevertheless, in spite 
of the wide divergence of opinion among Prot- 
estants with reference to the teaching of Scrip- 


a ae 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 8s 


ture, the belief in its infallibility carried with it 
the conclusion that the church as an institution 
was divinely established. Opinions might differ 
as to the particular form that the ecclesiastical 
organization ought to take, but that the church 
ought to exist in some organized form was re- 
garded as plainly taught by the Word of God. 
The chief function of authority in its epistemo- 
logical form, however, is to give religious cer- 
tainty or assurance to the individual. Vital re- 
ligious belief on the basis of purely objective evi- 
dence is difficult—indeed, impossible. We are 
all in our thinking sense-bound. The sense test 
is with us the great test of reality. Everything 
beyond that—the soul, God, his kingdom—is 
more or less vague and uncertain. We cannot 
grasp the unpicturable realm of spirit with the 
same firmness that we do the things of sense. 
Hence there is a felt need of some objective aid 
to certainty. We crave an authority on which 
we can lean. And we do so all the more eagerly 
because of the sacredness of the interests in- 
volved. There are many things about which we 
are content to be uncertain. It is not a matter 
of vital concern to us whether the various de- 
bated theories in astronomy, geology, physics, 
chemistry, and the other sciences are correct or 
not. We may be interested in them but our own 
lives are not seriously affected by the question 


86 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


of their truth. Matters of this kind we are quite 
willing to leave in abeyance. But in the field of 
religion the situation is quite different. Here 
we have to do with the most sacred interests of 
life; we are concerned with the question of re- 
demption and of man’s eternal destiny. And 
when it comes to questions of this kind we crave 
certainty. William James says that “for practi- 
cal life at any rate the chance of salvation is 
enough. No fact in human nature is more char- 
acteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. 
The existence of the chance makes the difference 
. . . between a life of which the keynote is resig- 
nation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’’® 
In this statement there is no doubt some truth. 
There is a good bit of the gambler in man. It 
is also true that there is an immense difference 
between entertaining the chance of salvation and 
giving it up altogether. But if the religious his- 
tory of mankind makes anything clear, it is that 
men have not been content with the mere chance 
of salvation. They want something more, they 
want assurance. It is this fact, coupled with the 
natural difficulty of religious belief, that has led 
men to seek for some objective authority to 
which they may appeal to settle the vexed prob- 
lems of faith. 

In dealing with these profound problems the 


‘The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 526. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 87 


human mind is supposed to be incompetent. It 
is related of Augustine that one day as he was 
walking along the shore absorbed in meditation 
he came upon a little child who with a shell was 
carrying water from the sea and pouring it into 
a hole in the sand. 

“What are you doing, my child?” asked Au- 
gustine. : 

“I am emptying the ocean into this hole,’’ was 
the reply. 

“That is impossible,’ said the great scholar. 

“Not more impossible than for you to empty 
the universe into your intellect,” replied the child 
and vanished. 

This story illustrates the feeling that many 
have had and many still have toward the am- 
bitious efforts of the human mind to penetrate 
the mystery of the universe. These efforts, it is 
thought, are necessarily doomed to failure. Man 
cannot himself solve the problem of existence 
and of human destiny. On questions of this 
character philosophers have never agreed and 
never will agree. If we are, therefore, to be 
saved from skepticism, we must have super- 
natural guidance, some sure word of God. Only 
a divine revelation can give to man the assurance 
that he needs. And this revelation must be free 
from all error. If it is not, if there is in it an 
admixture of the human and the divine, it cannot 


Ses 


88 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


serve as the basis of religious certainty. For in 
that case it would be necessary to distinguish 
between the divine content and the human set- 
ting, and to do this is beyond the power of the 
human reason. Revelation must, therefore, be 
infallible, if it is to serve its epistemological func- 
tion in human life. And it must also be embodied 
in some definite form, either that of an infallible 
Book or that of an infallible church, if it is to 
give to men the guidance and assurance they 
need. 

Such, in substance, was the form that the 
doctrine of religious authority had at the begin- 
ning of the modern era. It was in this form 
that it came into conflict with modern science. 
To religious authority based on pedagogical and 
sociological grounds there could be no reasonable 
objection. But an infallible religious authority 
superior to science and philosophy, and even con- 
travening them, was something that inevitably 
awakened opposition. Here, then, at the dawn 
of the modern age were two opposing forces, 
one based on revelation and authority, the other 
on reason and the autonomy of the human spirit. 
One of these, when carried out in a thoroughgo- 
ing way, seemed to exclude the other; yet each 
apparently had a certain validity. To adjust the 
two to each other became thus a matter of vital 
religious interest. Theology could not hope 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 89 


permanently to defy modern science, and yet it 
could not surrender the idea of an authoritative 
revelation. Somehow it was felt a way must be 
found by which the latter could be retained and 
still due acknowledgments be made to science. 
How to do this was for a long time the burning 
question in Protestant theology, and with many 
it still remains a serious problem. 


In order more fully to understand this prob- 
lem it will be well to take a general survey of 
the history of biblical study. This history may 
be divided into two periods: the period of tradi- 
tion, and the transition from the period of tradi- 
tion to that of criticism. The first of these 
periods extends down to the Reformation, and 
the second from that time down to the present. 
We are still in the period of transition, though 
the free, critical attitude toward the Bible has in 
recent years been widely adopted by Protestants. 
During most of the period of tradition biblical 
study was dominated by the doctrine of bibli- 
cal infallibility, by the allegorical method of inter- 
pretation and by the principle of ecclesiastical 
authority, and was, furthermore, bound up with 
a more or less dualistic and empiricistic type of 
philosophy. These different factors were not de- 
duced one from the other. They had diverse 
origins. But they tended to form a logical sys- 


go PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


tem. This will become evident as we briefly 
consider each ef them. 

The doctrine of scriptural infallibility was in- 
herited from the Jews. It seems to have grown 
up among them during the scribal period preced- 
ing the Christian era. It formed no part of the 
teaching of the classical prophets. They laid 
no claim to absolute inerrancy. Hosea, for in- 
stance, seems to have predicted that the fall of 
the house of Jehu would be synchronous with the 
end of the northern kingdom, and yet when this 
did not prove to be the case he published the 
prophecy in its original form, evidently laying 
no stress on the strictly literal fulfillment of his 
word (1. 4). Jeremiah’s earlier prophecies of 
doom apparently had in mind the Scythians as 
the instrument of Jehovah’s wrath (chapters 2- 
6), but when the peril from this quarter faded 
away and the Babylonians became the threaten- 
ing power in southwestern Asia the prophet did 
not hesitate to publish the earlier prophecies and 
apply them to the new foe (chapter 36). Mani- 
festly, he laid no stress on the exact manner in 
which Jehovah’s judgment upon Judah’s sin 
would be fulfilled. Still more interesting is a 
passage in Ezekiel (29. 17-21) -where it is im- 
plied that the prophet’s prediction of doom upon 
Tyre (27. 36; 28. 19) was not fulfilled. He had 
expected that Nebuchadrezzar would capture the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT QI 


city, but after a long siege the Babylonian king 
was forced to relinquish his task. So as a rec- 
ompense for the failure of his campaign against 
Tyre he was promised Egypt asa prey. It1s clear 
from such instances as these, and also from the 
general attitude of the canonical prophets toward 
the future, that they laid no stress on the mere let- 
ter of their messages. That they were themselves 
divinely inspired they had no doubt. But their 
inspiration was ethical, not mechanical, in nature. 
“As for me,” says Micah, “TI am full of power by 
the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment and of 
might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, 
and to Israel his sin” (3. 8). What Micah and 
the other prophets were concerned about was not 
to record with perfect accuracy objective events 
in the past, present, or future, but to stir the 
consciences of men and to bring home to them 
the great moral and spiritual truths revealed to 
them. It was in this moral and spiritual passion 
that their own inspiration consisted. 

But when the living word of the prophet had 
largely died out in Israel and the scribe had come 
into the ascendancy, it was only natural that a 
different conception of inspiration should gain 
currency. There was now no inner experience 
by which to test the prophetic consciousness, and 
hence the prophet’s “Thus saith the Lord” was 
interpreted in an external way. It was supposed 


92 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


that God spoke audibly to the prophets and that 
they simply recorded what they had heard with 
the hearing of the ear. Inspiration, in other 
words, was conceived of as dictation. This con- 
ception, it will have to be admitted, has the merit 
of simplicity and clearness. Everyone can under- 
stand it. In this respect it has the advantage 
over all other theories of inspiration. Other 
theories are all more or less vague and difficult 
of comprehension by the average mind. Verbal 
inspiration is a perfectly clear conception, and it 
has, furthermore, the advantage of guaranteeing 
the objective authority of Scripture. If every 
word of the Bible is inspired, the book is mani- 
festly infallible, and no further question need _ 
be raised about its authority. On the other hand, 
if inspiration is general in character and applies 
only to certain ideas in Scripture, it becomes a 
problem to determine in what respect and to 
what extent Scripture is authoritative. To solve 
this problem we have only human reason to fall 
back upon, and in such matters it seems untrust- 
worthy. Hence the uncritical mind feels the need 
of an infallible book. The Bible for it must be . 
all divine or it is not divine at all. This is the 
way uncritical thought reasons; and so no doubt 
the early Jewish scribes argued, as they gradually 
built up their doctrine of strict biblical infalli- 
bility. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 93 


This doctrine was probably, to begin with, a 
spontaneous growth. It was not directly nor 
consciously deduced from philosophical premises. 
Nevertheless, it stood related to and was per- 
petuated by a dualistic and empiricistic type of 
thought. The early prophets represented God 
as both transcendent and immanent. This con- 
ception received its most striking and impressive 
expression in the trisagion of Isaiah’s inaugural 
vision: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: 
the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6, 3). 
The latter part of the verse expresses the idea of 
the divine immanence. This idea was never com- 
pletely forgotten in Israel, but from the time of 
Ezekiel on the idea of the divine holiness or 
transcendence, expressed in the first part of the 
verse, came more and more into the foreground.’ 
The God who had destroyed his own people by 
permitting them to be carried into exile was so 
great and awful a Being that the tendency was 
to think of him as far removed from the common 
life of men and from the ordinary course of 
events. There arose, consequently, a felt need of 
mediators between God and men, and the belief 
in angels rapidly developed.* Miracle also came 
to be regarded as the form under which God 


See my Religious Teaching of the Old Testament, 


pp. 147ff. 
*Ibid., pp. 201ff. 


04 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


properly manifested himself. He stood apart 
from the world and only on occasion intervened 
in its processes. A dualistic type of thought thus 
came into vogue. It was not wrought out into a 
logical system by the Jews, but its general drift 
and spirit were such that it readily fused with the 
dualistic tendency in Greek philosophy. Dualism 
in later Greek thought was more radical than 
among the Jews. It was ethical as well as meta- 
physical. But the general idea of an antithesis 
between God and the world was common to both 
Jews and Greeks, and from both sources it en- 
tered into early Christian theology, giving direc- 
tion to it during most of the pre-Reformation 
period. 

Metaphysical dualism distinguishes sharply be- 


tween the natural order and the direct activity 


_ Of God. It assumes that if God manifests him- 


\ 


self in the world, it must be in a miraculous way. 
If he reveals himself in a book, the book cannot 
have been written as other books are. It must 
have been miraculously produced; and if miracu- 
lously produced, it is manifestly the direct word 
of God and hence infallible. The doctrine of 
biblical infallibility thus finds its logical support 
‘ina ‘a dualistic philosophy. It is the belief in the 
undivineness of the natural that leads us to 


assume that revelation, if real, must be miracu- 
lously mediated. If we believed in the divineness 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 95 


of the natural, we might find the word of God in 
the Bible, even though its various books were 
written in much the same way as other books are. 
It is the dualistic antithesis of the natural and 
the supernatural that results in setting the Bible 
apart as an absolutely unique and infallible book. 
At first this dualistic type of thought was not 
clearly defined. It was only half consciously that 
it gave rise to the idea of biblical infallibility. But. 
when the two ideas came to be clearly formu- 
lated, it was evident that the latter had its logical 
basis in the former. Biblical infallibility_ pre- 
supposes a dualistic philosophy, such as was dom- 
inant in the early and medizval church. 
Another philosophical underpinning of the 
doctrine of biblical infallibility is to be found in 
the empiricistic theory of thought current in an- 
tiquity. There was, it is true, in Greek phil- 
osophy a strong rationalistic tendency. Reason 
was distinguished from sense experience, and the 
primacy was assigned to reason. It was this tend- 
ency also that came into closest contact with 
Christian thought and most deeply influenced it. 
But while reason was regarded as independent of 
sense experience, it was not thought of as cre- 
ative. Its ideas were not derived from the senses, 
but from somewhere, it was thought, they must 
have come. The human mind did not originate 
them. ‘Plato,’ says Windelband, “as little as 


96 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


any of his predecessors, recognizes a creative ac- 
tivity of the~consciousness, which produces its 
content. This is a general limit for all Greek 
psychology; the content for ideas must somehow 
be given to the soul; hence, if the ideas are not 
given in perception, and the soul nevertheless 
finds them in herself on occasion of perception, 
she must have already received these ideas in 
some way or other.”® So Plato speaks of phil- 
osophical knowledge as “recollection.” Reason 
was thought of as the passive recipient of ideas 
that originally came to it from without, and in 
this sense even Greek rationalism may be spoken 
of as empiricistic. 

The point of chief importance for our purpose, 
however, is that this conception of the passivity 
of the human mind was applied in a heightened 
form to prophets and seers. “Inspired and true 
divination,” said Plato, “is not attained by any- 
one in his full senses, but only when the power 
of thought is fettered by sleep or disease or some 
paroxysm of frenzy.” The mind of the prophet 
was represented as a musical instrument upon 
which the Divine Spirit played. This was the 
common idea of inspiration in antiquity. In- 
spiration did not stimulate a man’s natural men- 
tal powers in an extraordinary way; it sup- 
pressed them, making his mind the passive instru- 


*A History of Philosophy, p. 119. 


_ 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 97 


ment of an external force. A man was supposed 
to be inspired when the normal functioning of 
his mind ceased, and he spoke and acted as 
though possessed by some demon or spirit. In 
the case of true inspiration this meant that the 
prophet was the mere channel of the divine word, 
the colorless medium through which the divine 
message was communicated to men, a kind of 
phonograph or dictograph. He himself created 
nothing, he simply echoed the divine voice. His 
message, consequently, was free from all admix- 
ture of human error. It was the pure word of 
God and hence infallible. The complete passivity 
of the prophetic mind necessarily carried with 
it this conception of the prophetic utterances. It 
is, then, clear that the empiricistic theory of 
thought and knowledge and the dualistic meta- 
physics, current in antiquity, furnished both a 
congenial soil for the growth of the doctrine of 
biblical infallibility and a logical basis for 
it when once it had come to be generally held. 
These different ideas tended to form a unitary 
system. 

But the system was soon seen to be impractical | 
without the addition of the allegorical method” 
of interpretation. This method seems to have 
had its origin among the Greeks during the fifth 
century B. C. They employed it in their inter- 
pretation of Homer and Hesiod. Only by such a 


98 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


method could the teaching of these sacred poets 
be brought into harmony with later philosophy. 
Crude and unworthy narratives in their poems 
were supposed to embody and symbolize pro- 
found philosophical truths. In this way, and in 
this only, did it seem that true reverence for the 
ancient poets could be maintained in a later and 
more refined age. The method was in common 
use among the Greeks, and hence, when the Jews 
came into contact with Greek culture in Alex- 
andria and elsewhere, they naturally adopted it 
and applied it to the interpretation of their own 
sacred books. 

Philo, for instance, by employing this method 
robbed the Mosaic books almost wholly of their 
natural meaning, reading back into them his own 
philosophical and religious ideas. According to 
his interpretation, “the literal statement that God 
cast Adam into a deep sleep and made Eve of one 
of his ribs is fabulous; the meaning is that God 
took the power which dwells in the outward 
senses, and led it to the mind. The serpent means 
pleasure. . . . The five cities of the Plain are 
the five senses. . . . Moses is intelligence; Aaron 
is speech; Enoch is repentance; Noah righteous- 
ness. Abraham is virtue acquired by learning; 
Isaac is innate virtue; Jacob is virtue obtained by 
struggle; Lot is sensuality; Ishmael is sophistry ; 
Esau is rude disobedience; Leah is patient vir- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 99 


tue; Rachel innocence.”?° Thus the concrete and 
living figures of the Old Testament became sim- 
ply dim personifications. 

The Palestinian rabbis did not carry the alle- 
gorical method to such extremes as did Philo. 
Their method was somewhat more mechanical in 
nature; but the idea underlying it was about the 
same. Scripture was regarded as a book of hid- 
den meanings, whose real purport could be ex- 
tracted only by fanciful devices of one kind or 
another. For instance, the numerical value of 
the letters in the Hebrew words for “Shiloh 
come” (Gen. 49. 10) is the same as the numeri- 
cal value of the letters in the Hebrew word for 
“Messiah.” Hence Shiloh was identified with 
the Messiah.1? By such exegetical methods as 
these it is evident that almost any idea could be 
found in the Bible. Yet some such method 
seemed necessary to accommodate the ancient 
and infallible words of Scripture to the needs of 
a later day. Many passages in the Old Testa- 
ment in their natural and obvious sense had be- 
come obsolete. Either, then, they must contain 
some hidden mystical meaning or they must cease 
to be considered infallible. Accordingly, since 
the latter idea was generally accepted, the former 


“FR, W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, pp. 144, 
146. 
“Tbid., p. 98. 


100 PRESENT TENDENCIES?IN 


conclusion was drawn. The allegorical method 
of interpretation followed necessarily from the 
doctrine of biblical infallibility. 

These two conceptions were linked together 
when Christianity appeared upon the scene. 
Christian teachers, consequently, naturally ac- 
cepted them both. The allegorical method was 
employed by Paul (Gal. 4. 21-31; 1 Cor. 9. of.), 
and despite protests here and there became domi- 
nant in the early and medieval church. By many 
it was carried to a fantastic extreme. 

Augustine “tells us that the condemnation of 
the serpent to eat dust typifies the sin of curiosity, 
since in eating dust he ‘penetrates the obscure and 
shadowy’; and that Noah’s ark was ‘pitched 
within and without with pitch’ to show the safety 
of the church from the leaking in of heresy.”! 
As regards the scriptural number forty he re- 
marks that “forty is four times ten. Now, four, 
he says, is the number especially representing 
time, the day and the year being each divided 
into four parts; while ten, being made up of 
three and seven, representing knowledge of the 
Creator and creature, three referring to the three 
persons of the triune Creator, and seven re- 
ferring to the three elements, heart, soul and 
mind, taken in connection with the four ele- 


“A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science 
with Theology in Christendom, ii, p. 299. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IOI 


ments, fire, air, earth and water, which go to 
make up the creature. Therefore this number 
ten representing knowledge, being multiplied by 
four, representing time, admonishes us to live 
during time according to knowledge—that is, to 
fast for forty days.’’?* Again, when the psalm- 
ist says, “I laid me down and slept; I awaked”’ 

(3. 5), “Augustine asks whether anyone can be 
so senseless as to isuppose that ‘the prophet’ 
would have made so trivial a statement, unless 
the sleep intended had been the Death, and the 
awakening the Resurrection of Christ.’’4 

Gregory the Great, in his work on Job, says 
that the seven sons typify the twelve apostles, for 
“the apostles were selected through the seven- 
fold grace of the Spirit; moreover twelve is pro- 
duced from seven—that is, the two parts of 
seven, four and three, when multiplied together 
give twelve.’’?° 

Such was the prevailing method of biblical 
interpretation during the long period of tradi- 
tion. It owed its prevalence partly to the lack 
of a truly scientific and historical spirit, but 
chiefly to practical and dogmatic considerations. 
There was an urgent and compelling need that 
the Bible be interpreted in such a way as to meet 

“Thid., ii, p. 298. 

“FE. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, P. 238. 

*A. D. White, ibid., ii, p. 300. 


102 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the altered conditions of a new age. It was nec- 
essary that the Old Testament be made to antici- 
pate the teaching of the Greek philosophers, and 
also that it be made to preach Christ. Other- 
wise it would lose contact with the living 
thought of the church. But on the assumption 
of biblical infallibility such an adjustment of 
biblical teaching to a later date was possible only 
by means of the allegorical method. If Christ 
was to be found everywhere in the Old Testa- 
ment, it was evident that the text must be 
' allegorized; and if later Greek philosophy and 
theology were to be found there, it was still more 
evident that the text must be allegorized. The 
allegorical method of interpretation was the only 
method by which the teaching of an infallible 
book could be made sufficiently elastic to meet 
the needs of a changing and developing church. 

But while the allegorical method met the prac- 
tical and dogmatic needs of the early church, it 
had its own perils. The chief difficulty with it 
is that it has no fixed principles. It has no norm, 
no objective standard, for the guidance of the 
exegete. It leaves everything to the taste and 
whim of the individual. The inevitable result 
is a distracting diversity in the interpretation of 
Scripture. The imagination runs riot in the 
effort to find symbolic meanings for the multi- 
tudinous natural objects referred to in the Bible. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 103 


This, it is evident, cannot but be intellectually de- 
moralizing. It tends to destroy the sense of 
veracity. But apart from this it need have no 
serious practical consequences for the church so 
long as the conclusions reached by the different 
interpreters are in harmony with the funda- 
mentals of the Christian faith. Under those cir- 
cumstances the church would have no reason for 
interfering with the perfectly free interpreta- 
tion of Scripture, no matter how fanciful the 
interpretations in some cases might be. But let 
heretical ideas be supported by appeals to Scrip- 
ture and the situation is at once changed. The 
allegorical method used by the heretic is the 
same as that employed by the church; the biblical 
argument in one case is as valid as in the other. 
There is, therefore, no way of convincing the 
heretic that his interpretation of the Bible is 
wrong. He justifies his conclusions by the same 
exegetical method as does his orthodox opponent. 
Both appeal to Scripture, but the allegorical 
method employed by both necessarily renders the 
appeal of each indecisive, since there is no objec- 
tive means of determining in any particular case 
whether the method is correctly applied or not. 
The only way, accordingly, for the church to 
maintain its own unity in the face of heretical 
teaching is to seek by the exercise of authority to 
control the interpretation of the Bible. And 


104 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


this it was forced to do early in its history. 
Gnostics and other heretics appeared in its ranks, 
who by allegorizing the Christian Scriptures 
found in them a basis for their own views. 
Exegetical argumentation did not and could not 
avail against them. Hence the church was com- 
pelled to resort to the strong arm of ecclesiastical 
authority. It insisted that only those interpreta- 
tions of Scripture were valid that were in har- 
mony with tradition and with its own accepted 
standards. By this means it curbed the heretical 
tendencies encouraged by the allegorical method 
and also moderated the exegetical license inherent 
init. In no other way apparently could the unity 
of the church at that time have been maintained. 
We thus see that the principle of ecclesiastical 
authority in the field of biblical study was ren- 
dered necessary by the allegorical method of in- 
terpretation, that this exegetical method, in turn, 
grew inevitably out of the doctrine of biblical 
infallibility, and that the latter owed its origin 
and prevalence to the dualistic and empiricistic 
type of thought current in antiquity. 

These different ideas, thus logically related to 
each other, were dominant during the first fif- 
teen centuries of Christian history, and formed 
_ the controlling principles in biblical study dur- 
ing that long period. Counter movements were, 
of course, not lacking. The Antiochian school, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 10s 


represented by Theodore of Mopsuestia and 
Chrysostom, protested against the allegorizing 
of Scripture, and did what it could to bring the 
church back to a sane grammatical and historical 
method of Bible study. But the tide was too 
strongly set in the opposite direction for much to 
be accomplished. There were also currents of 
thought hostile to the principle of ecclesiastical 
authority. In spite of the power of the church 
Christian sentiment was at heart democratic. 
Jesus and Paul had taught the perfectly free rela- 
tion of the soul to God, and however much this 
idea may have been obscured in subsequent times, 
it was never completely obliterated. It remained 
within the church as a constant protest against 
ecclesiastical tyranny. Furthermore, the tradi- 
tional Christian belief in the supreme authority 
of Scripture came into conflict with the claims of 
the church. Formally the church not only ad- 
mitted but asserted the supreme authority of the 
Bible. The doctrine of biblical infallibility im- 
plied it. But by reserving to itself the exclusive 
right of interpretation the church actually sub- 
ordinated Scripture to itself. The Bible, how- 
ever, could not be kept completely within the 
hands of the ecclesiastical authorities. It was 
studied by devout souls, and when a manifest 
disparity was seen to exist between its teaching 
and the life of the church, it was used as a 


1066 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


weapon against the principle of ecclesiastical au- 
thority. Then,*too, while a dualistic philosophy 
was dominant in the early and medieval church, 
it did not completely hold the field. People had 
learned from Scripture the idea of the divine im- 
manence. God is in the world, is near men, 
and is near all men. In him we live, and move, 
and have our being. This idea is implicit in the 
Christian faith, and was never completely for- 
gotten. It received frequent expression among 
the church Fathers, and in so far as it was under- 
stood, it inevitably tended to moderate the pre- 
vailing sharp antitheses between the natural and 
supernatural, the human and the divine, the laity 
and the priesthood, and the secular and the reli- 
gious. The way was thus prepared for a less 
rigid conception of inspiration and a more demo- 
cratic view of church authority. 

But while these counter movements were 
operative in the early church and during the 
Middle Ages, they did not become militant until 
the time of the Reformation. Then they broke 
forth with revolutionary power and ushered in 
a new period of biblical study. This period I 
have called a transition era. We have not yet 
completely emerged from it. In it we see the 
gradual disintegration of that authoritarian 
system built up during the period of tradition. 

This transitional era may be subdivided into 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 107 


two periods of about two hundred and fifty years 
in the one case and one hundred and fifty in the 
other. The first was characterized by the re- 
jection of the principle of ecclesiastical authority , 
and the allegorical method of interpretation, and 
the second by the gradual abandonment of the 
doctrine of biblical infallibility, though the latter 
process has not yet been completed. The first 
is the period of the older Protestantism, the 
second that of the newer or modern Protestant- 
ism. b 

The keystone in the medizval system was the 
principle of ecclesiastical authority. No real 
progress in biblical study was possible until it 
had been dislodged. Against it, therefore, the 
Reformers directed their main attack. The prin- 
ciple in its origin had been a sound and, on the 
whole, a beneficent one. It had aimed to guard 
the church against the encroachments of heresy, 
and had also served as an effective means of 
disciplining multitudes of untutored minds and 
keeping them under the sway of Christian teach- 
ing. So far as we can see, under the conditions 
that prevailed in the early church and during the 
Dark Ages, these results could not have been ac- 
complished in any other way. The people as a 
whole, especially after the invasion of the Bar- 
barians from the north, were not ready for the 
private and individual interpretation of the 


108 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


Scriptures ; and, if they had been, the allegorical 
method then in vogue would have rendered it im- 
practicable. Only the strong arm of authority 
could in those days maintain the necessary unity 
of the faith. But the principle of authority, like 
other principles which have been beneficent in 
their origin, became later a source of oppres- 
sion. It should, as Sabatier says, have labored 
“like every good teacher . . . to render it- 
self useless.’’ But instead it put barriers in the 
way of the rational development of the human 
mind. It interposed obstacles between the indi- 
vidual soul and God. It subjected men to an 
obsolete system of thought. It suppressed the 
rights of individuals. It withheld the Bible 
from the laity, and made a truly scientific study 
of it impossible. Nothing consequently re- 
mained for the progressive forces in the church, 
those who believed in democracy and in the 
supreme authority of Scripture, but utterly to 
repudiate the authority of Pope and councils. 
The Bible, they insisted, belonged to the people, 
and every individual had the right to interpret it 
according to the light that the Spirit had granted 
him. 

But if utter confusion was to be avoided among 
Christian people, it was evident that the Reform- 
ers must go one step further and reject also the 
allegorical method of interpretation. So long as 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 109 


there was an authoritative interpreter of Scrip- 
ture, it was possible to restrain the allegorist, at 
least to the extent of keeping him within the 
bounds of orthodoxy. But when the idea of an 
authoritative interpreter was repudiated, as 1t was 
by Protestants, and when the right of the indi- 
vidual to interpret the Bible according to his own 
private judgment was asserted, there was no 
longer any way of controlling the allegorist. The 
bars were now all down. It was possible for each 
one to read into Scripture whatever he chose. If, 
then, Protestant thought was to be saved from a 
disintegrating individualism, it could be only by 
the adoption of a new method of biblical study, 
a method based on the commonly accepted prin- 
ciples of literary interpretation. Such a method 
would not lead to complete agreement in the in- 
terpretation of the Bible—the numerous Protes- 
tant sects are evidence of that—but it would lead 
to a far greater degree of uniformity than under 
the allegorical system. Furthermore, it is the 
only method consistent with a rational view of 
revelation. If God meant to reveal himself in a 
book, it is evident that the book must be intelligible 
to people in general, and such intelligibility is 
possible only in case its natural and literal mean- 
ing is accepted as the correct one. To make of 
the Bible a cryptogram, a book of hidden mys- 
teries, as one does in interpreting it allegorically, 


1Ii0 = PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


is to destroy its real revelational value. True 
reverence for Scripture, therefore, as well as the 
ecclesiastical need of uniformity in matters of 
doctrine, led the Reformers to reject the alle- 
gorical and adopt the grammatical-historical 
method of interpretation. The latter method, 
fortunately, had been developed by the humanists 
during the preceding century in their study of 
the ancient classics. All that Protestant scholars, 
accordingly, needed to do was to apply it to the 
study of the Bible. | 
In thus maintaining that the same literal 
method should be employed in the interpretation 
of Scripture as of other books and in rejecting 
the principle of ecclesiastical authority the Re- 
formers made very important and far-reaching 
contributions to the development of biblical study. 
To a large extent they shattered the traditional 
system, but they did not completely break with 
it. Its fundamental assumption, that of biblical 
infallibility, they retained, and not only retained — 
but gave to it a degree of emphasis that it had 
not previously received. The reason for this is 
not far to seek. The dualistic and empiricistic 
philosophy of earlier times had been carried over 
into the new period, and brought with it the be- 
lief that divine revelation, if real, must be infal- 
lible. It also brought with it the feeling that a 
divine and infallible authority is necessary as the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT am 


ground of religious certainty. Without such an 
authority men could have no sure conviction con- 
cerning the objects of faith. No adequate basis 
for religious belief could be found either in 
reason or experience. This was the common 
opinion of the day. Hence Protestants felt the 
need of an absolute objective authority to oppose 
to that of the church. Since the Roman Catholic 
Church claimed infallibility for itself, they felt 
it necessary to make a similar claim for the Bible. 
Anything less than that would have left them 
without adequate means of defense against their 
opponents. For in that day nothing short of an 
infallible standard of truth could serve as the 
rallying center of an ecclesiastical organization 
and as a basis of religious assurance. The Re- 
formers accordingly were practically forced by 
existing conditions to adopt an extreme view rela- 
tive to biblical inspiration. Luther, for instance, 
said that “one letter of Scripture is of more con- 
sequence than heaven or earth.’ At times, it is 
true, he expressed himself in a quite different 
vein; but the logic of his position, as he conceived 
it, pointed toward the stricter conception of 
Scripture, and it was this type of thought that 
prevailed in the Protestant churches in general. 
The authority of the Bible was identified with 
its infallibility. The two were regarded as cor- 
relative terms. One implied the other. This was 


112. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


a firm conviction of the Reformation period, and 
it sank deep into Protestant thought, dominating 
biblical study for fully two centuries and a half. 

It was with this conception of biblical author- 
ity that Protestant Christianity faced the modern 
world. Augustine’s statement, that “nothing is 
to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, 
since greater is that authority than all the powers 
of the human mind,” was accepted as valid in 
the field of religion. The Bible was looked upon 
as a body of absolute truth, as a kind of “‘paper- 


pope,’ to which the human reason must submit. 


The inevitable result was that a sharp conflict 
arose between Protestant theology and modern 
thought. The conflict was made all the more 
serious by the Protestant insistence on the literal 
interpretation of Scripture. From the scientific 
point of view this hermeneutic method repre- 
sented an important advance beyond the allegor- 
ical, but from the apologetic standpoint it created 
a difficult situation. For the literal meaning of 
Scripture is far less elastic than the supposed 
mystical or allegorical meaning, and hence its ad- 
justment to modern thought is a much more diff- 
cut matter. One might, to be sure, take the view 
that no such adjustment is necessary, that, on the 
contrary, it is the duty of the human mind to de- 
termine the plain and natural meaning of Scrip- 
ture and then submissively accept it, regardless 


Pe 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 113 


of its nature. But however plausible this view 
may be from the authoritarian standpoint, it is 
quite impracticable in our modern world. Reason 
to-day is autonomous; it acknowledges no for- 
eign master; it cannot be coerced. The only con- 
dition on which it can recognize the authority of 
Scripture isthe proof or conviction that scriptural 
teaching is itself rational. The Bible to win the 
modern mind must itself become modern. But to 
modernize the Bible and bring it into harmony 
with modern science was rendered peculiarly dif- 
ficult by the Reformers’ combination of the literal 
sense with verbal inspiration. This, says Inge, 
has been “the great weakness of Protestantism” ; 
but it is a weakness that is capable of being reme- 
died. And during the past hundred and fifty 
years Protestant thought has been busily engaged 
with the task of providing the remedy. 


The remedy manifestly lies in a reinterpretation 
of the principle of authority and in a broadening 
of the idea of reason so as to make it include the 
religious nature of man. With the latter process 
we will deal in a later lecture. Here we are con- 
cerned with the principle of authority. Its rein- 
terpretation will consist in detaching it from the 
idea of, inerrancy and in giving to it a rational 
and spiritual instead of a coercive character. In 
other words, it will be reinterpreted in such a 


114.))PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


way as not to conflict with the autonomy of the 
human reason. Such a reinterpretation has 
been rendered both necessary and possible by 
various developments in the modern thought 
world. 

What first called for an abandonment of the 
doctrine of biblical infallibility was the conflict 
between the natural science of the Bible and that 
of modern times. Modern astronomy, geology, 
and biology manifestly opened up a very differ- 
ent world-view from that reflected in the Bible. 
Strenuous efforts were for a long time made to 
force the biblical text into harmony with the 
conclusions of science. The “days” of the first 
chapter of Genesis were lengthened into geolog- 
ical periods. The antediluvian patriarchs with 
their abnormally long lives were transformed into 
dynasties. The statement in Job (26. 7) that 
God “hangeth the earth upon nothing” was in- 
terpreted as an anticipation of the Copernican 
astronomy, and the saying of the Psalmist (1309. 
15) that his frame was “curiously wrought in the 
lowest parts of the earth’ was declared to be 
a veiled expression of the Darwinian theory of 
man’s descent. But such interpretations as these 
were clearly forced and unnatural. They did 
violence to the text. They were as foreign to its 
original meaning as were the allegorizations of 
the early and medieval church. Then, too, the 


Ee On 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 11s 


process was one that never came to an end. New 
scientific discoveries were constantly being made, 
and the problem of adjustment thus became more 
and more complicated, until finally candor com- 
pelled theologians to admit the hopelessness of 
their harmonizing task. The modern thought 
world cannot be found in the Bible. Between 
the natural science of the Bible and that of our 
own day a choice must be made, and this for the 
modern man means necessarily the rejection of 
the belief in biblical infallibility. 

Another modern development that led to the 
same conclusion was the science of biblical criti- 
cism. The Reformers had put biblical study on 
a grammatical-historical basis, but the Bible it- 
self they set apart as a miraculously inspired 
book, whose origin could not be accounted for 
in the same way as that of other books. Its real 
author was the Holy Spirit. It was not, there- 
fore, amenable to the laws that govern the com- 
position and development of other literary works. 
It was sw generis, and could not be incorporated 
into a general history of literature. This con- 
ception of its character was implicit in the idea 
of its infallibility. But the scientific spirit of 
modern times could not be content to leave the 
Bible in such isolation. It pressed for a rational 
and natural explanation of its origin. At first 
this inquiry seemed sacrilegious, but gradually it 


116) \PRESENT TENDENCIES ain 


won its way until to-day its main conclusions are 
generally accepted by biblical scholars. 

It was the Jewish philosopher, Benedict Spi- 
noza (1632-77), who first outlined the program of 
modern biblical study. His Tractatus Theologico- 
Politicus (1670) may be regarded as “the first 
document in the modern science of biblical criti- 
cism.” In it he clearly formulated the principles 
that should govern a free, unbiased, and truly 
scientific study of the Scriptures. These prin- 
ciples were first applied in a comprehensive way 
to the history of the text and versions of the Old 
and New Testaments (1685, 1689) by the Roman 
Catholic scholar, Richard Simon (1638-1712). 
His work lay chiefly in the field of what is known 
as the “lower criticism.” The so-called “higher 
criticism,” that is, the scientific study of the bibli- 
cal literature itself, its structure, sources and his- 
tory, first came into vogue among Protestant 
scholars in Germany during the latter half of the 
eighteenth century. It was J. G. Eichhorn (1752- 
1827) who first applied the general principles of 
literary criticism to the entire Old and New Tes- 
taments (1780-83; 1804-12). Chief significance 
attaches to his work in the Old-Testament field. 
There he worked out and gave general currency 
to the documentary hypothesis relative to the 
structure of the Pentateuch, though the hypothe-. 
sis itself he did not originate. It goes back to 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 117 


Jean Astruc, a French physician (1753). Asa 
result of Eichhorn’s work and that of other Ger- 
man scholars interest in biblical criticism rapidly 
increased until it became the all-absorbing topic 
of theological discussion. 

The year 1835 was one of special significance. 
In it there appeared three books that had a far- 
reaching influence. One was by Wilhelm Vatke 
(1806-82) on The Religion of the Old Testament. 
In it Vatke anticipated what is now commonly 
accepted as the solution of the Pentateuchal prob- 
lem. . Before his time De Wette (1806-07) had 
identified Deuteronomy with the law-book found 
in the Temple in 621 B. c. and made the basis of 
the Josianic reform. What Vatke did was to 
assign the Priestly Document, containing the 
Levitical law, to the postexilic period. This view 
was later taken up by Wellhausen (1844-1918) 
and presented in such a convincing way that most 
Old-Testament scholars have adopted it. The re- 
sulting conception of the origin and structure of 
the Pentateuch carried with it a complete recon- 
struction of the history of Old-Testament religion 
and literature. It put the leading prophets be- 
fore the main body of the law and also led to 
the assignment of most of the Psalms and Wis- 
dom Literature to the period after the exile. This 
radical change of view relative to the origin of 
the Old Testament left, of course, no place for 


TIS: PRESENT TENDENCIES "IN 


the belief in its infallibility. Indeed, it implies 
that considerable portions of it are unhistorical. 

The other two important books published in 
1835 had to do with the New Testament. One 
was David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus, and 
the other a treatise by Christian Ferdinand Baur 
On the So-called Pastoral Epistles, These works 
mark the beginning of New-Testament criticism 
in the strict sense of the term. What had been 
done previously was largely preliminary in nature. 
Here we have for the first time a radical recon- 
struction of New-Testament history similar to 
that of the Old Testament. The conclusions, 
however, of Baur and Strauss have not won such 
wide assent as have those of Vatke and Well- 
hausen in the Old-Testament field. The theories 
of the Tubingen school, founded by Baur, rela- 
tive to the origin of the New-Testament books 
have been to a large extent modified by later criti- 
cism in a conservative direction. But this does 
not mean that the traditional standpoint is any 
more in favor among New-Testament than it is 
among Old-Testament scholars. The two-source 
theory (Mark and Q) in the case of the synoptic 
Gospels is in principle as wide a departure from 
the traditional view as the documentary theory in 
the case of the Pentateuch. Doubts concerning 
the historicity of John’s Gospel are also common, 
and there is a widespread skepticism with refer- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 119 


ence to the New-Testament miracles. In general, 
it may be said that the present attitude toward 
the New Testament is as free and critical as that 
toward the Old; and this attitude has become so 
general as to be virtually irresistible. ‘Individ- 
ual subjective criticism,” as Strauss says, “is a 
water-pipe which any boy may close for a time; 
objective criticism, as it is accomplished in the 
course of centuries, advances like a foaming cur- 
rent, against which all sluices and dams are pow- 
BreSsio 

Along with the development of biblical criti- 
cism, and to some extent involved in it, went the 
idea of evolution, which likewise has had an im- 
portant bearing on the doctrine of biblical infal- 
libility. The idea of evolution or of a progressive 
revelation is not altogether lacking in Scripture. 
We find it in the Priestly Document, and it is im- 
plied in Paul’s statement that Christ did not come 
until the “fullness of time.” But the idea was not 
applied in a thoroughgoing way to history until 
comparatively recently. When taken in a strict 
sense it manifestly excludes the infallibility of the 
Bible as a whole. If the people of Israel, like 
every other nation, developed from a lower to a 
higher state, it is evident that the revelation made 
to them in their earlier history could not have 


*OQuoted by Otto Pfleiderer, Development of The- 
ology, p. 133- 


120 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


represented the same high standard as that found 
in later times, and hence could not have been in- 
errant. Then, too, the idea of an infallible body 
of truth, such as was supposed to be contained in 
the Bible, would, if consistently adhered to, make 
real progress impossible. We would with such a 
revelation be hopelessly bound to the past. The 
Bible can be an agent of progress only if a dis- 
tinction be made between the permanent and the 
transient elements in it. Its ideals, its fundamen- 
tal principles are of abiding worth and validity. 
Properly applied, they contribute to progress, but 
only because they are capable of ever new appli- 
cations to the changing conditions of human life. 
The concrete regulations of Scripture cannot be 
regarded as absolutely authoritative. If they 
were, the normal development of human society 
would be interfered with. The very idea of evo- 
lution or historical growth rules out the notion of 
an infallible standard of truth. 

This fact together with the literary criticism of 
the Bible and the conflict of its natural science 
with that of modern times has resulted in the 
gradual abandonment of the doctrine of verbal 
inspiration and biblical inerrancy. It was not, 
however, simply the objective evidence in the case 
that brought about this result. Hobbes once said 
that “even the axioms of geometry would be dis- 
puted if men’s passions were concerned in them”; | 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 121 


and if so, it is hardly probable that people would 
have been convinced by the argument against 
biblical infallibility, if they had not been per- 
suaded that their own religious interests were not 
endangered thereby. What has made it pos- 
sible for Protestants to give up the doctrine of 
infallibility has been a change in their phi- 
losophy. Three items in this change may be 
specified. 

First and foremost is the acceptance of the idea 
of the divine immanence. This idea has, as we 
have seen, a scriptural basis, and it received 
not infrequent expression among the church 
Fathers. But not until comparatively recent 
times did it become a basic principle in philosophy. 
It was Berkeley and the German idealists of a 
century ago who gave to it its established place 
in modern thought. - Previous to that time theo- 
logical thinking had been for the most part dual- 
istic. It was governed by a sharp antithesis be- 
tween the natural and the supernatural, and this 
antithesis implied that revelation is a miraculous 
process and hence necessarily infallible. But all 
this is changed by the modern doctrine of the 
divine immanence. God is now regarded as mani- 
festing himself in the ordinary processes of 
nature as well as in miracle. Revelation, there- 
fore, does not necessarily imply the direct and 
inerrant communication of divine truth to men. 


T2211 PRESENT TE NDENGIE Sy 


The human mind in its natural state, with its 
natural limitations and imperfections, may serve 
as a channel for divine messages. God may speak 
to men, even though much that is transient and 
imperfect is bound up with the transmission of 
his word. Infallibility does not inhere in the 
idea of revelation. 

Another important development in modern 
philosophy is the Kantian doctrine of the consti- 
tutive or creative activity of thought. According 
to this doctrine the mind does not passively mir- 
ror an objective order. It receives certain stimuli 
from without, and then builds up its own world 
by virtue of principles inherent in its own nature. 
This holds true of all our mental activity, and 
must apply to the prophets as well as to men in 
general. When the ancient seer received 1m- 
pulses from the Divine Spirit, we are not to 
suppose that he transmitted them unchanged to 
the world. Before they could be communicated 
to men it was necessary that they be mentally 
assimilated, transmuted into the forms of human 
thought, and colored by the mind’s own atmos- 
phere. In some such complex way as this our 
modern psychology requires us to conceive of the 
process of inspiration. It thus awakens a very 
different expectation from what the older empiri- 
cistic conception did with its stress on the passiv- 
ity of the prophet’s mind. With our present con- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 123 


ception of the mind as active and creative we do 
not expect to find the prophetic messages inerrant. 
Such a view is inherently improbable. Our theory 
of thought negates it rather than supports it. “We 
have,” as A. E. Rawlinson says, “no more reason, 
a priori, to look for infallibility in the sphere of 
intellect as the result of that operation of the 
Divine Spirit which we call inspiration than we 
have to look for impeccability in the sphere of 
conduct, as the result of that parallel operation 
of the same Spirit which we call grace.”!*7 In 
both instances the human factor necessarily colors 
and diverts the stream of divine activity. 

But not only has modern philosophy rejected 
the empiricistic psychology and dualistic meta- 
physics, that formed the background and basis of 
the doctrine of biblical infallibility; it has also — 
introduced a new test of truth. The old view 
was that in order to be believed a proposition 
must either be logically demonstrated or be cer- 
tified to by some absolute authority. On no 
other basis could it claim acceptance, and on no 
other ground could any leader expect his mes- 
sage to be accepted. “He,” said John Locke, 
“whom anyone will pretend to set up in this kind, 
and have his rules pass for authentic directions, 
must show, that either he builds his doctrine upon 
principles of reason, self-evident in themselves; 


“Foundations (edited by B. H. Streeter), p. 368. 


24 PRESENT OPENDENGIESaN 


and that he deduces all the parts of it from thence 
by clear and evident demonstration: or must 
show his commission from heaven, that he comes 
with authority from God, to deliver his will and 
commands to the world.”18 Of these two meth- 
ods the first is manifestly impracticable in the 
field of religion. Religious beliefs cannot be 
logically demonstrated, nor are they self-evident 
truths. If they are to be accepted, it must be 
because they have been authoritatively revealed. 
Such was the common view in the past. Hence 
the doctrine of infallibility arose and maintained 
itself practically unchallenged down into modern 
times. The doctrine was supposed to be the nec- 
essary ground of religious certainty. 

But since the time of Kant a new test of truth 
has been receiving increasing recognition. We 
call it the pragmatic test. According to pragma- 
tism certainty in practical matters is based on 
experience, not on speculation or on some assumed 
external authority. “Concrete certainty in gen- 
eral,’ as Bowne says,, “has a complex root in 
life as a whole. There is no simple and single 
objective standard, labeled certainty, which may 
be mechanically applied for the testing of truth. 
The living mind itself, with its interest and ten- 
dencies and furniture of experience, is the only 
standard; and this mind, in immediate contact 


“The Reasonableness of C hristianity, p. 142. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 125 


with reality, attains to certainty about many 
things, and ignores the skeptical challenge as an 
antiquated verbal contention.”1® In the case of 
our senses, for instance, it is evident that they 
sometimes deceive us. How, it might then be 
asked, are we to determine when to trust them and 
when not? To this question in the abstract there 
is no answer. But in actual life we solve the 
problem by disregarding it, by going out into the 
world, using our senses, and finding that they are 
in general reliable. And so it is also with the 
Bible. It is not infallible, any more than our 
senses are; and in the abstract it is impossible to 
determine what parts are divine and what not. 
But in actual experience the problem vanishes. 
We use the Bible and discover that it finds us at 
greater depths of our being than does any other 
book. It proves itself a lamp to our feet and food 
to our souls, and by so doing establishes its own 
trustworthiness. Further proof of its inspiration 
we do not need. Its divine character justifies 
itself in our experience, and it does so regardless 
of the question of its strict inerrancy. The latter 
doctrine has lost its raison d’étre. Modern 
philosophy has rendered it religiously unneces- 
sary as well as inherently improbable. Hence 
thinking people have gradually laid it aside as an 
outworn and outgrown garment. 


*The Immanence of God, p. 109. 


126 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


This, however, does not mean that the Bible 
has surrendered its claim to being the supreme 
authority in religion. Auguste Sabatier in a well- 
known book has opposed the “Religion of the 
Spirit” to the “Religions of Authority.” But 
this is a mistaken antithesis. The true antithesis 
is that between an external and coercive authority 
on the one hand, and an inner and spiritual au- ~ 
thority, on the other. The former we reject in 


the realm of religious belief, but the latter we 


cannot dispense with. The spirit of man is not 
sufficient unto itself; it needs light from with- 
out. In one sense “the religion of the spirit is a 
very important fact, but when it sets up in oppo- 
sition to the religion of a book, the light that is 
in it is apt to turn to darkness. Individual dark 
lanterns never contribute much to the light of 
the world.”?° What the world, therefore, needs, 
is not the rejection of biblical authority, but a_ 
reinterpretation of it; and this is the task on 
which Protestant thinkers have been engaged dur- 
ing the past century and a half. They have been 
seeking to make the authority of Scripture more | 
real and vital than ever by rationalizing and spir- 
itualizing it. And that they have in a large 
measure succeeded in their aim is implied in what 
Sabatier himself says concerning the Bible. “It 
is,” he says, “the book above all books, light of 


*B. P. Bowne, The Immanence of God, p. IIo, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 127 


the conscience, bread of the soul, leaven of all 
reforms. It is the lamp that hangs from the 
arched roof of the sanctuary to give light to thése 
who are seeking God. The destiny of holiness on 
earth is irrevocably linked with the destiny of 
the Bible.”*1 A book of which this can be truly 
said is certainly still our supreme authority in 
religion. 

In actual influence the Bible has lost nothing 
by renouncing the claim to infallibility. Rather 
has it gained. The old view made extravagant 
claims, and “the retribution for extravagant 
claims is apt to be the repudiation of all claims 
whatsoever.” Many in the past rejected the Bible 
altogether because of its antiquated science and 
its obsolete views of nature and history. De- 
fenders of the faith unfortunately did not then 
realize that “the old that ages he must let go 
who would hold fast the old that ages not.” But 
all this is now changed. The Bible is no longer a 
rock of offense to modern science. The literary 
fiction on which the older view of its inspiration 
was based has been given up. We now have a 
fairly adequate scientific account of its origin and 
history. And the ancient science imbedded in it 
is no longer regarded as a constituent part of its 
message. The old conflict, consequently, between 


“The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the 
Spirit, p. XXXvV. 


128. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the Bible and modern science is at an end. The 
anti-authoritarianism of science does not stand 
opposed to the authority of Scripture. Both 
meet in the common conception of the autonomy 
of the human spirit, an autonomy, however, that 
| does not exclude divine illumination. The result 
is that the spiritual message of the Bible has to- 
day free course in a way that it did not have here- 
tofore. Liberated from its entanglement with ex- 
traneous and obsolete conceptions it addresses 
itself with new power to the hearts and con- 
sciences of men. There is an old saying to the 
effect that the purpose of the Bible is not to show 
men how the heavens go but how to go to heaven. * 
We may not be quite satisfied with the latter part 
of this saying, but it at least brings out the fact 
that there is a religious content of Scripture that 
may be separated from its ancient Oriental setting 
and that the true purpose and abiding worth of 
Scripture is to be found in this content. 

We are not, however, to understand this as 
meaning that there is, as it were, a Bible within 
the Bible, that is, certain definite portions, like 
the words of Jesus, which are to be accepted as 
infallible. Such a view would mean a relapse 
into the older form of authoritarianism. The_ 
real authority of Scripture is to be found in the 
realm of the spirit. It is the Spirit of God breath- 
ing through Scripture as a whole that constitutes 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 129 


its divine content. This content cannot be re- 
duced to fixed formule. It defies exact analysis, 
but it is a fact none the less, a real force, man- 
datory though not coercive. We recognize it 
especially in connection with the great characters 
of biblical history. Take, for instance, the 
prophets. “They tower like giants above their 
times. In the crucial periods of their people’s 
history, when it seemed that the true religion was 
about to fall into ruin under the weight of moral 
corruption, popular superstition and heathenism, 
and foreign invasion, they snatched, as it were, 
from the very bosom of God the great truths of 
his righteousness, his love, his sovereignty, and 
armed with these, went out and smote the of- 
fenders against the moral law of God, high and 
low, lashed the people for their superstition and 
heathenism with ridicule and scorn, rebuked the 
craven fear of king and multitude, and hurled 
defiance into the teeth of the insolent invader. 
It is one of the most thrilling spectacles of his- 
tory to observe the originality and fertility of 
conception, the passion of soul, and the sublimity 
of faith with which these lonely men on the Pales- 
tinian hills met the impending doom of their 
people. One cannot do so, one cannot watch 
them in their apparently unequal struggle with 
ignorance and iniquity at home and with brute 
force abroad without receiving a new injection of 


130?) PRESENT TENDENGIESaly 


moral heroism. It is as though the magnetic 
and dynamic power of these great souls some- 
how leaped .across the chasm of these two and 
a half millenniums and penetrated our very 
bemes +" 

Still more, of course, does this moral and 
spiritual power issue forth from Christ. In him 
Scripture reaches its climax, and through him it 
exercises its chief influence in human life. The 
mere fact that such a man existed is itself a matter 
of commanding significance in the history of 
mankind. ‘“Surely,’’ says Phillips Brooks, “it 
must forever stand as a most impressive and sig- 
nificant fact, a fact that no man who is trying 
to estimate the worth and strength of spiritual 
things can leave out of his account, that the noblest 
and most perfect spiritual Being the world has 
ever seen, the Being whom the world with amaz- 
ing unanimity owns for its spiritual pattern and 
leader, was sure of God. I cannot get rid of the 
immense, the literally immeasurable meaning and 
value of that fact.” Here we have no external 
coercion, but we do have a compelling logic. 
However we may explain it, the figure of Christ 
is a marvelous source of spiritual power, a power 
that is at once the basis of organized religion and 
the ground of personal assurance. To him a real 
and permanent authority belongs, and from him 


“Quoted from my Old Testament Problem, pp. 22f. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 131 


it is conveyed to those sacred writings in which 
his image is eternally enshrined. The Bible has 
lost, then, for us the authority of force, but it has 
not lost the force of authority. 


132 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


CHAPTER IT 


EXPERIENCE AS A BASIS OF RELIGIOUS 
BELIEF 


Ir I were writing in the language of the schools, 
I should call this chapter “Theological Empir- 
icism.” In the preceding chapter we discussed 
briefly the empiricistic theory of knowledge in its 
relation to the doctrine of biblical authority, but 
here we deal with empiricism from a broader 
point of view. We raise the question as to 
whether experience can be made the basis of 
theology as it is of the natural sciences. Science 
is empirical; it rests on facts; it draws its material 
from observation and experiment. As against 
' mere tradition and as against purely abstract 
reasoning it appeals to the authority of the senses. 
For it immediate experience is the test of truth; 
the real is that which is given in direct percep- 
tion. It is the perceptual faculty that is the one 
foundation of knowledge. Reason begins with 
it, and to it returns for corroboration. To the 
scientific mind, therefore, experience is the final 
court of appeal; and understood in this sense 
empiricism is the only sound philosophy. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT reyes 


But “experience” and “empiricism” are both in 
need of more precise definition, Is experience 
limited to the sense world? Or is there such a 
thing as experience of supersensible reality? Are 
the sense-organs the only media for the appre- 
hension of reality? Or might there not be “a 
spiritual awareness of reality beyond sense which 
should be a revelation that could never be judged 
or tested by sense’?! This question is mani- 
festly one that has an important, if not a decisive 
bearing on the significance of empiricism for 
religion. The strict limitation of knowledge to 
sense experience would, it is clear, leave little 
place for religion. But if “experience” be broad- 
ened so as to include religious or mystical expe- 
rience, there is no necessary reason why religion 
should be seriously disturbed over the empiricis- 
tic principle that knowledge is limited to expe- 
rience. “Let empiricism,” says William James, 
“once become associated with religion, as hitherto, 
through some strange misunderstanding, it has 
been associated with irreligion, and I believe that 
a new era of religion as well as of philosophy 
will be ready to begin.”? However this may be, 
it is at least evident that the empiricistic appeal to 
experience, broadly interpreted, contains no neces- 
sary menace to religion. The religious thinker 


*B. P. Bowne, The Immanence of God, p. 75. 
°A Pluralistic Universe, p. 314. 


134)).) PRESENT TENDENCIBSIIN 


may take his place alongside of the scientist and 
insist that religion as well as science has its basis 
in experience. Only by “experience” he will 
mean an experience that is cognitive of spiritual 
as well as sensuous reality. That such cognition 
is possible, cannot be demonstrated. But this is 
true of all objective knowledge. “The gist and 
test of all perception,’ as Bowne says, “is the con- | 
viction of reality that accompanies it. This can 
never be deduced from anything else or referred 
to anything else.’’* Religious perception, there- 
fore, if real, stands in its own right just as* 
perception in general does. 

What in the past has made empiricism obnox- 
ious to religion has been partly the fact that it 
sought to reduce all knowledge to sense expe- 
rience, and partly the further fact that it ascribed 
complete passivity to the human mind.. The mind 
was regarded as a blank tablet on which marks 
were somehow made from without. These marks 
or sensations constituted experience. The mind 
itself contributed nothing to experience except the 
bare capacity of receiving sensations. Indeed, 
no real substantial existence was attributed to 
the mind. It was described as a mere succession 
of mental states or was identified with the stream 
of consciousness. Of late there has even been 
a tendency to deny consciousness itself. “It is,” 


‘The Immanence of God, pp. 756. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 135 


says William James, “the name of a nonentity, 
and has no right to a place among first principles. 
Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere 
echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disap- 
pearing soul upon the air of philosophy.”* _ It is 
this view that underlies behaviorism in psychol- 
ogy. Against it religion necessarily revolts. For 
religion by its very nature is interested in the 
soul, in its reality and permanence. It finds the 
real world, the world of abiding values, within 
us; and hence it instinctively turns away from 
empiricism, in so far as the latter tends to reduce 
the self to an unsubstantial stream or to a mere 
succession of passing mental states. 

But empiricism does not necessarily imply such 
a negative view of the self, any more than it 
requires the restriction of experience to sense 
experience. No doubt a radical and thorough- 
going empiricism, which seeks to eliminate every 
aprioristic element from knowledge, leads inevi- 
tably to the denial of a real self, but such an 
empiricism would also destroy the possibility of 
any articulate experience whatsoever. This was 
made clear once for all by the work of Hume and 
Kant. ‘Experience,’ as Bowne says, “apart from 
the constitutive activity of the mind, is an elusive 
phantasmagoria without intelligible content... . 
Articulate experience is possible only as the mind 


‘Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 2. 


136 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


imposes its rational forms on the sense matter.”’® 
A radical and consistent empiricism is thus self- 
destructive. It makes impossible the very expe- 
rience on which it professes to build. Professor 
J. H. Leuba® in his argument against the objec- 
tive validity of religious experience charges em- 
pirical theologians with a failure to distinguish 
between “truly immediate experience” and “im- 
mediate experience interpreted”; and in the sense 
in which he means it there is some truth in the 
charge. But, as a matter of fact, there is no 
“truly immediate experience’ that does -not 
involve some element of interpretation. All 
articulate experience is “interpreted” experience. 
“Bare, raw, experience” is an abstraction; if real, 
it would have no intelligible content. Experience, 
as commonly understood, is never purely passive; 
it always involves the creative activity of thought. 
Empiricism, in so far as it denies this activity, 
is altogether untenable. But the term “empiri- 
cism” is often used in a broader sense to desig- 
nate any theory that bases knowledge on actual 
experience rather than on abstract reasoning. In 
this sense of the term empiricism by no means 
excludes the reality of the self. Indeed, Borden 
P. Bowne called his personalistic philosophy 
“transcendental empiricism,” by which he meant 
‘Theory of Thought and Knowledge, p. 346. 
"A Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 234 ff. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 137 


that it is the living experience of the self as over 
against sense experience, on the one hand, and 
abstract logic, on the other, that constitutes the 
true key to reality. 

It is in this general sense of the term also that 
we speak of “theological empiricism.” By it we 
mean a theology based on religious experience 
rather than on metaphysical speculation. Such 
an empiricism, it is evident, stands sharply 
opposed to the traditional Humian empiricism. 
The two agree in making experience the basis of 
knowledge, but they differ radically in their con- 
ception of the nature and contents of experience. 
Traditional empiricism reduces all experience to 
sense experience and denies the real existence of 
the self, while theological empiricism affirms both 
the reality of the self and the validity of religious 
experience. Both types of empiricism also agree 
in this, that they stand in a close relation to the 
modern scientific movement and owe to a con- 
siderable degree their vogue to it. But neither 
is to be identified with science. Science is empir- 
ical, but it is not “empiricistic.” Empiricism is 
a speculative attempt to bring philosophy and 
theology into harmony with the supposed demands 
of empirical science. In carrying out this aim 
traditional empiricism practically eliminates the- 
ology and reduces philosophy to a theory of 
thought and knowledge—a theory, furthermore, 


138. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


which, when carried out in a thoroughgoing and 
consistent way, makes both science and experience 
logically impossible. Theological empiricism, on 
the other hand, seeks to save theology either by 
completely differentiating its field from that of 
science and so rendering it immune from attack 
or by transforming it into an empirical science. 
The former method is represented by the famous 
Ritschlian school and the latter by such a work 
as that recently published by Professor D. C. 
Macintosh, entitled Theology as an Empirical 
Science. 


These two empirical methods in theology are 
not mutually exclusive. In practice they to a con- 
siderable degree overlap each other. But for- 
mally they represent quite different attitudes 
toward science. One emphasizes the radical dif- 
ference between science and theology, while the 
other stresses their kinship. In each of these stand- 
points there is more or less of truth, and there 
is also a certain apologetic advantage in each. 
\ But each too has its drawbacks. That theology 
and modern science do not naturally and readily 
mix is evident from their past history. No doubt 
the conflicts between them have in large measure 
been due to mutual misunderstanding and to the 
unwarranted encroachment of one upon the ter- 
ritory of the other. But this very fact implies 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 139 


that the two have distinct and independent fields, 
and that the only way to maintain peace between 
them is for each to respect the rights of the other. 
Both, it is true, are empirical in their basis, but 
they deal with quite different aspects of expe- 
rience. Experience is partly a registering and 
partly an evaluating process. These processes are 
not entirely independent of each other; one 
accompanies the other. But they represent dif- 
ferent forms of mental activity. One is predomi- 
nantly cognitive in nature, and the other pre- 
dominantly affective and volitional. And of these 
it is the former, the cognitive or registering 
aspect of experience, with which science is pri- 
marily concerned, and which also forms the basis 
of traditional empiricism. Theology, on the other 
hand, has to do with experience as an affective- 
volitional or evaluating process. The empirical 
data, with which science and theology deal, are 
thus quite distinct from each other. And in this 
fact theology finds a warrant for its own inde- 
pendent existence and its own distinctive con- 
clusions. Science in view of the data with which 
it is concerned is purely descriptive. It has to do 
simply with the phenomenal. It reflects an objec- 
tive order, but it has nothing to say about the 
purpose and ultimate cause of that order. These 
are mysteries that only the practical reason, the 
affective-volitional nature of man, can penetrate. 


140. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


They belong, therefore, to theology. Science in 
this field is wholly incompetent ; and hence religion 
and theology are secure against attack. 

’ There is thus an apologetic advantage in em- 
phasizing the distinction between science and 
theology and in insisting on their mutual inde- 
pendence. In this way we apparently win for 
theology a storm-free port. But the method has 
also its disadvantages. For one thing, it leaves 
us with an unsatisfactory dualism. It divides 
the human mind against itself. It differentiates 
practical or religious knowledge so sharply from 
theoretical or scientific knowledge that the two 
seem to be opposed to one another. This is a 
view in which thought cannot rest. We need 
greater unity in our mental life. We cannot be 
content to be atheists with the head and Chris- 
tians with the heart. Then, in the next place, it 
is urged that to base religion entirely on the 
practical or affective-volitional nature leads to 
illusionism. If religion is merely the product of 
our feelings and desires, it has no objective valid- 
ity. Theology by adopting this method may 
secure its independence but only at the expense 
of its veracity. We need, therefore, a closer 
alliance between theology and science if the 
former is to establish itself as worthy of credence. 
For science, as Troeltsch says, “despite all its 
prematurities and errors, is still a power of 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 141 


truth.’7 It carries with it the note of reality. 
And this is what we need above everything 
else in theology. We need to have the ideal 
world of religion and the real world of science 
so fused together into a consistent whole, that 
our total world view will be religious and yet 
at the same time bear the unmistakable stamp 
of truth. 

Hence the effort has of late been made to trans- 
form theology into an empirical science. “The 
bulk,” says D. C. Macintosh, “of what 1s taught 
in modern theological institutions is made up of 
science which is no longer theological and theology 
which is not yet scientific. . .. Systematic theology 
is not now and never has been an empirical 
science. And yet this does not mean that it 
cannot become a science, and that in the very near 
future.’® If it should become such, there would 
manifestly be this advantage, that it would fall 
into line with the modern thought world as a 
whole and so have nothing to fear from that 
quarter. God would be regarded as a datum of 
religious experience very much as the material 
world is given in sense experience. As “the ul- 
timate Object of religious dependence, or the 
Source of religious deliverance” he would be 
accepted as an immediate fact of consciousness. 


"Die Sozialphilosophie des Christentums, p. 31. 
‘Theology as an Empirical Science, pp. 6, 25. 


142 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


His existence would be recognized as revealed not 
only through the pragmatic but also through the 
perceptive side of experience. A purely prag- 
matic theology is dogmatic. It assumes that~ 
what ought to be, because of that very fact is. 
A truly scientific theology, however, makes no 
such assumption. It starts with the fact of God 
as something immediately given in religious expe- 
rience. It sees in him not a mere postulate but 
an intuited and verifiable reality. This type of 
theology, therefore, differs from the pragmatic 
in that it aims to be “not a theology of mere pos- 
tulates, but a theology of verified truth about 
reality.”’ It admits that “appreciation of genuine 
religious value is an important factor in the 
recognition of the presence of the divine Real- 
ity’; but it insists that “the realistic apperception, 
or cognition of the religious Object as a real 
Being, causally active within the field of religious 
experience, is also an essential factor in religious 
cognition and religious common sense.”® Hence 
from its standpoint God is not to be regarded as a 
deduction from religious experience but as a real- 
ity immediately grasped in religious experience. ~ 
His existence is thus verifiable, capable of being 
established by empirical means and having the 
same kind of certitude as the existence of the 
external world. 


°"D. C. Macintosh, ibid., pp. 28, 32. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 143 


Then, too, it is urged that theology would be 
far more fruitful in a practical way if it were to 
become “scientific in the full, modern sense of 
the term.” “If this were to happen,” we are told, 
“results of the most momentous importance might 
be expected.” Theology might then duplicate 
the magnificent contributions made by the phys- 
ical, mental, and social sciences to human prog- 
ress, “for religion,’ we are reminded, “has 
always been a potent factor in directing human 
development.”?° But alluring as this prospect 1s, 
the critical theologian cannot but view it with a 
large measure of skepticism. 

The chief objection to it is found in the fact 
that the religious intuitions of people, even of 
the mystics, are not sufficiently definite in their 
objective content, nor do they occur. regularly 
enough, to be regarded as “scientific facts.” So 
far as the average person is concerned, the divine 
presence is an analytic implication of his religious 
consciousness rather than a direct presentation 
comparable to the objects of sense experience. 
At least the latter type of religious experience 1s 
a very rare occurrence. It is for the most part 
confined to the mystics, and in their case, “the 
Entity or Power or Presence which they claim to 
apprehend is not verifiable in the way in which 
an object must be verifiable before it can become 


*D. C. Macintosh, ibid., p. 3. 


ia PRESENT SEEN DEAE Sern 


a scientific object.’’*? It is too vague, too incom- 
municable, and too esoteric in its manifestations 
to be a scientific fact. The experience may be 
valid, but its validity cannot be tested the way 
scientific data must be. No fact can be said to be 
scientific that is not “describable in terms capable 
of communication to all rational beings and cap- 
able of verification by all properly equipped 
observers.” And that the experiences of the mys- 
tics do not meet these tests is generally admitted. 
These experiences cannot be brought about by 
training. They are peculiar to a very limited 
number of people, and even among them are 
apparently not subject to law but are rather 
instances of the wind’s blowing where it listeth. 
As subjective psychical events these experiences 
are, of course, not to be questioned. In that 
respect they are adequately attested. But it is 
only in that respect that they belong to empirical 
science. The Object, which they profess to 
apprehend, lies beyond scientific demonstration. © 
Empirical science has nothing to do with the 
question of the objective validity of religious 
experience. All it can give us is a psychology of 
religion; and that is what theology would be 
reduced to if it were to become an empirical 
science in the strict sense_of the term. 


“J. B. Pratt in American Journal of Theology for 
I9I0, p. 190. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 145 


This criticism the empirical and scientific the- 
ologian meets by saying that “theology is related 
to the psychology of religion much as the physical 
sciences are related to the psychology of sense 
experience. Psychology of religion is simply a 
department of psychology, and psychology is the 
science which describes mental activity and expe- 
rience as such. Empirical theology, like the 
physical sciences, would be a science descriptive 
not of experience but of an object known through | 
experience. Psychology describes the activities 
of the human mind; theology is concerned with 
the activities of God. . . . No better reason can 
be given for reducing theology to the psychology 
of religion than can be given for reducing physics 
and chemistry to the psychology of sense-expe- 
rience. And as we cannot maintain the physical 
life without acting on the assumption that our 
realistic intuition as to physical objects is essen- 
tially true, so neither can we maintain the re- 
ligious life without acting on the assumption that 
our realistic intuition with reference to the divine 
is essentially true.”?? But plausible and striking as 
this analogy is, it fails to carry conviction for the 
reason above given. God is not a datum of con- 
sciousness in the same way that the objects of ° 
sense experience are. There are, it is true, resem- 


*D. C. Macintosh, Theology as an Empirical Science, 
pp. 26, 32. | 


146). PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


blances between scientific knowledge and religious 
knowledge, and these may properly be empha- 
sized. But there are also fundamental differ- 
ences, and these cannot be canceled by the use 
of a common terminology to describe both types 
of cognition. 

There is no doubt an apologetic advantage at 
the present time in being able to refer to theology 
as an empirical science. To do so puts it under 
the egis of the great scientific movement. The 
feeling is thus awakened that theology has now 
nothing to fear from “the giant tread of the 
empirical sciences,” for it has itself joined the 
procession. But in spite of this apparent union 
no real amalgamation between theology and 
science has taken place or can take place. The- 
ology even in its empirical uniform is at heart 
metaphysical and always will remain such. It is, 
as J. B. Pratt says, “more closely related to an 
empirically based metaphysics than to empirical 
science.” And since this is necessarily the case, 
it is doubtful if any particular benefit will accrue 
to theology from its arraying itself in the verbal 
garments of science. The current scientific 
phraseology and methodology may no doubt to 
some extent be adopted to advantage by the the- 
ologian, but on the whole it probably will be 
better for him to continue to speak his own 
language. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 147 


This, however, does not mean that theology can 
be or ought to be unresponsive to the empirical 
trend in modern thought. This trend is too 
strong and too well-grounded to be successfully 
resisted. It is broader than the scientific move- 
ment, though the latter has contributed enor- 
mously to its strength. Science has been and) is 
the great exponent of the empirical method. . But 
the appeal to experience is not confined to science. 
It has a well-established place in the philosophy 
of common sense. With the average man as well 
as with the scientist experience is the signature 
of reality. Popular as well as scientific thought 
has consequently been an important factor in 
promoting the empirical tendency in modern 
philosophy and theology. And so we find that 
with the breakdown of the principle of authority 
theology of the more vital type has usually turned 
to experience for its “pou sto.” The movement 
was slow in coming to self-consciousness and has 
expressed itself in several different forms, but 
since the time of Schleiermacher (1768-1834) 
it has represented the main current in religious 
thought. 


During the early and medieval periods of the 
church’s history theology did not make much of 
the appeal to experience. The practical value of 
the Christian life was, of course, appreciated, and 


- 


148 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the mystics dwelt with enthusiasm on the super- 
lative worth of that intimate union and com- 
munion with God which they had experienced. 
But systematic apologetics made little or no use 
of this line of evidence. This was due largely 
to the fact that theology during this long period 
was dominated by the rationalistic or speculative 
standpoint of Greek philosophy and by the prin- 
ciple of ecclesiastical authority. It was also due 
in part to the objective and mechanical concep- 
tions of redemption current in the Eastern and 
Western churches. In the Greek church salva- 
tion was regarded as a mystical and semi-magical 
process effected through participation in the sac- 
raments; it was not necessarily a matter of con- 
scious experience. And in the Roman Church it 
was largely an institutional affair. The indi- 
vidual was saved through submission to the 
authority of the church. His own subjective 
experience was a matter of minor concern. Under 
those circumstances one might have supposed that 
stress would be laid upon the more objective side 
of Christian experience, the ethical and socio- 
logical value of Christianity. But conditions did 
not favor the employment of this line of argu- 
ment. “If medizeval faith,’ says A. W. Benn, 
“found no lasting support in speculation, still less 
did it find a support in practice. The modern re- 
ligious system of verification by conduct—what I 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 149 


have called ethical ophelism—was not one 
whose application was desirable in those times; 
for from Abelard to Dante all the great writers 
of the Middle Ages are agreed in considering 
the morality of Greece and Rome as unquestion- 
ably superior to that of their own contempo- 
raries,”’18 

In our day, however, conditions in this respect 
have changed. Some Roman Catholic apologists 
now stress the fact that they ground Christianity 
in the objective experience of society rather than 
in the subjective experience of the individual. 
Chatterton-Hill, for instance, says: “It is accord- 
ing to their objective consequences for society 
that all religious doctrines must be judged... . 
The supreme importance of Christianity lies far 
more in its objective sociological value than in its 
subjective individual value. . . . It is time to 
transfer the justification of Christianity from the 
unstable basis of individual aspirations and indi- 
vidual wants, and to establish it on the sure basis 
of the sociological value of Christian doctrine.’’+4 
In these utterances sociology is substituted for the 
Aristotelian logic and to this extent the empirical 
as opposed to the speculative standpoint is 
adopted. But otherwise we have the same objec- 
tive method of justifying Christianity that we 

“History of English Rationalism, i, p. 69. 

“The Sociological Value of Christianity, pp. xii, 20. 


150.) PRESEN TTENDENGIESSIN 


find in the medizval period, and we also have 
implied the same objective conception of salva- 
tion. The~ individual’s redemption, from the 
Roman-Catholic standpoint, is not necessarily a 
conscious spiritual process, self-evidencing in 
character. It is, rather, an item of faith, some- 
thing secondary, guaranteed by the authority of - 
the church. It may or may not manifest itself in 
the form of Christian assurance; but in any case 
this subjective experience cannot be made the 
basis of the Christian faith. A more objective 
and stable basis is needed; and this, it is thought, 
can be found only in the infallible authority of 
the church or in that authority combined with 
metaphysical speculation or with sociology or 
with both. Such in principle is the Catholic posi- 
tion. It is not, then, strange that the appeal to 
Christian experience did not figure prominently 
in the apologetics of the early and medieval 
church. 

It was the Reformation that first made sys- 
tematic use of the evidential value of Christian 
experience. This was due partly to the exigencies 
of theological controversy and partly to the new 
conception of salvation introduced by the Re- 
formers. With Luther and Calvin Christianity 
was primarily a life, a personal and conscious 
experience. Salvation, as they conceived it, was 
not a mystical and semiconscious or subconscious 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Ist 


state of the soul brought about through the super- 
natural agency of the church and its sacraments. 
It was, rather, an ethical transformation, effected 
by the immediate activity of the Divine Spirit. It 
was an inward spiritual state that welled up in 
consciousness and that found its true content and 
justification in conscious experience itself. It 
was a present life of faith which manifested itself, 
not in intellectual assent to the doctrines of the 
church, but in active ethical and spiritual fellow- 
ship with the living God. And with such a con- 
ception of redemption it was inevitable that atten- 
tion should be focused upon Christian experience 
as it had not been before. Then, too, the appeal 
to experience served the immediate needs of 
Protestant apologetics. Having rejected the au- 
thority of the church and put in its stead the 
authority of the Bible, the question arose as to 
what ground the Protestants had for believing 
that the Bible is the true Word of God. They 
could not in confirmation of their belief appeal, 
as did the Roman Catholics, to the church’s 
authority ; and so they turned to the inner witness 
of the Spirit. God himself, they said, so illu- 
mined the mind of the believer, that there arose 


within him the immediate conviction of the truth | 


of Scripture. Parallel to this, they also held, was 
the fact that the believer by virtue of his expe- 
rience of regeneration had within him the assut- 


152) “PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ance that he was a child of God. This assurance 
needed no external support, and in a similar way 
the Christian’s conviction with reference to the 
authority of the Bible needed no ecclesiastical rati- 
fication. The truth of Scripture was guaranteed 
by the divinely illumined insight of the regenerate 


heart. Personal Christian experience thus took, © 


in Protestant apologetics, the place previously oc- 
cupied by the authority of the church. 

But Protestant thought did not long remain 
true to its original experimental standpoint, and 
not till centuries later was a serious effort made 
to work out the full logical implications of this 
standpoint in the field of theology. Even during 
Luther’s lifetime there was a tendency to trans- 
form Protestantism into a new orthodoxy, and 
after his death this tendency became dominant in 
the Lutheran church. Special stress was laid on 
“pure doctrine’; a new scholasticism developed ; 
and the speculative type of apologetics was re- 
vived. 

Against this deadening intellectualism there 
was a strong reaction in the form of Pietism, a 
movement that appeared in England as Puritan- 
ism and later as Methodism. This movement laid 
stress on vital religious experience. Spener 
(1635-1705) found the only true apologetic in 
John 7.17: “If any man willeth to do his will, 
he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of 


% 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 153 


God, or whether I speak of myself.’ And 
Richard Baxter (1615-1691), known as the 
father of English apologetic science, made much 
of the evidence of Christian experience. “Our 
present actual and habitual faith and renovation 
of our souls,” he says, “and the sacred inclina- 
tions and actions therein contained are a stand- 
ing evidence within us; as the written Word and 
the miracles of Christ are without us; from 
which we may soundly argue for the verity of 
Christianity, and may look on them as an infal- 
lible testimony for Christ... . The help which 
he promised in temptations, the hearing of prayer, 
the relief in distress—all these I have found 
performed; and therefore I know that the gospel 
is true.’’'> But on the whole the pietistic move- 
ment did not contribute much to the development 
of theology. Its chief theological significance lay 
in the fact that it tended to weaken the strangle- 
hold that an intellectualistic orthodoxy had on 
the church. “Whatsoever the generality of people 
may think,” said John Wesley, “it is certain that 
opinion is not religion. . . . Right opinion is as 
distant from religion as the east is from the 
west. Persons may be quite right in their opin- 
ions, and yet have no religion at all; and, on the 
other hand, persons may be truly religious, who 


*Vol. xx, p. 136. Quoted in The Evidence of Chris- 
tian Experience, by L. F. Stearns, p. 393. 


i540 (PRESENT TENDENCIES ih 


hold many wrong opinions.”!® This liberal atti- 
tude, however, in doctrinal matters led to no 
new creative principle in theology. The Meth- 
odists and Pietists in general accepted the more 
fundamental Christian doctrines that had come 
down from the past without making any serious 
attempt to refashion them. In their own vivid 
religious experience they found a verification of 
the truth of Christianity, but they themselves 
were too much absorbed in the promotion of 
practical piety to realize the importance of recon- 
structing the traditional theology and making it 
conform more closely with the demands of their 
own experimental religion. Nevertheless, in spite 
of its general theological sterility Pietism was 
the true mother-soil of modern empirical the- 


ology. 


It was Schleiermacher (1768-1834), brought 
up ina Moravian school, who first took the empir- 
ical principle inherent in Protestantism, especially 
in its pietistic form, and applied it in a master- 
ful way to the reconstruction of Christian the- 
ology. The general application of this principle 
to apologetics had already, as we have seen, been 
made by the mystics, the Reformers, and the 

“Works, vol. ii, p. 20. Quoted by D. A. Hayes in 


Studies in Philosophy and Theology (p. 90), edited by 
E.On Wilrm: 


cd 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 155 


pietists. But the argument was taken up anew 
and elaborated in an original and impressive way 
by Schleiermacher. First, he took the pietistic 
aversion to a dry intellectualism and a shallow 
moralism and justified it by an examination into 
the nature of religion. He showed that religion 
is not in its essence a kind of knowing or of 
doing, but something deeper than both, a kind of 
feeling, “the feeling of absolute dependence.” 
This feeling is something that can be understood ° 
only in and through experience. “You must,” 
he said to the cultured despisers of religion in 
his day, “transport yourselves into the interior 
of a pious soul and seek to understand its inspi- 
ration. . . . Otherwise you can learn nothing of 
religion.” “Quantity of knowledge is not quan- 
tity of piety... . Religion is not knowledge and 
science, either of the world or of God... . In 
itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite 
in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.” 
“Belief must be something different from a mix- 
ture of opinions about God and the world, and 
of precepts for one life or two. Piety cannot be 
an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical 
and ethical crumbs. If it were, you would 
scarcely oppose it.” “Only when piety takes its 
place alongside of science and practice, as a neces- 
sary, an indispensable third, as their natural 
counterpart, not less in worth and splendor than 


156 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


either, will the common field be altogether occu- 
pied and human nature on this side complete.’’!7 
Schleiermacher thus confirmed by psychological 
analysis the conclusion instinctively reached by 
pietists and others before his day. He made it 
clear that religion is a unique element in human 
nature. It is independent of science and moral- 
ity, and not only independent, it is equally funda- 
mental, and therefore may justly and logically be 
regarded as equally trustworthy. In other words, 
religion is self-evidencing; it finds its justifica- 
tion in itself. 

In the next place, Schleiermacher brought out 
the fact that the empirical principle in theology 
carries with it the conclusion that it is in the 
positive religions, the actual organized faiths of 
mankind, and in them only, that true religion is 
to be found. The various philosophical and 
ethical substitutes that men had proposed he 
‘regarded as untrue to the essential nature of 
religion and as of little or no value. To people 
inclined to indorse these substitutes he said: 
"The different existing manifestations of religion 
you call positive religions. Under this name they 
have long ‘been the object of a quite preeminent 
hate. Despite of your repugnance to religion gen- 
erally, you have always borne more easily with 





“On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 
translated by J. Oman, pp. 18, 35f, 31, 37f. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 157 


what for distinction is called natural religion. 
You have almost spoken of it with esteem. I do 
not hesitate to say at once that from the heart I 
entirely deny this superiority. For all who have 
religion at all and profess to love it, it would be 
the vilest inconsequence to admit it... . The so- 
called natural religion is usually so much refined 
away, and has such metaphysical and moral 
graces, that little of the peculiar character of 
religion appears. . . . Every positive religion, on 
the contrary, has certain strong traits and a very 
marked physiognomy, so that every movement, 
even to the careless glance, proclaims what it 
really is... . You will find, then, that the positive 
religions are just the definite forms in which 
religion must exhibit itself{—a thing to which your 
so-called natural religions have no claim. They 
are a vague, sorry, poor thought that corresponds 
to no reality, and you will find that in the positive 
religions alone a true individual cultivation of the 
religious capacity is possible.’’!* Religion, accord- 
ing to Schleiermacher, is social in nature. It is an 
historical growth. It “begins and ends with his- 
tory.”1® Apart from its manifestation in the 
organic life of society it is a mere abstraction. 
It is not, then, religion in general or some modern 
sublimation of it, whose truth is attested by expe- 


AEDs D. et 7s 
*Ibid., p. 80. 


Pe 


158 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


rience, but positive, historical religion. It is 
actual organized Christianity that finds its justi- 
fication in itself. 

But important as the foregoing considerations 
were from the apologetic point of view, still more 
significant was Schleiermacher’s application of 
the empirical principle to theology itself. Here- 
tofore apologists and theologians had found in 
experience a pragmatic justification of the tradi- 
tional theology but had not used it as an instru- 
ment of theological criticism. What Schleier- 
macher did was to make Christian experience a 
norm for testing and judging the traditional doc-, 
trines themselves. Here was something new. 
The older theology began with the objects of 
faith. It was a doctrina de deo et rebus divinis. 
It sought to expound and establish the correct 
teaching concerning God and divine things on 
the basis of certain objective authorities, laying 
the main stress now on the Bible, now on eccle- 
siastical dogma, and now on reason. By way of 
contrast with this method Schleiermacher began 
with faith itself as a subjective experience. 
His theology was a Glaubenslehre, a science or 
doctrine of faith. The function of theology, as 
he conceived it, was to take the Christian con- 
sciousness as a text and give a scientific exegesis 
of it, expound its contents. In doing so one 
would inevitably make use of the Bible and of 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 159 


ecclesiastical tradition; but they would not be ac- 
cepted as external standards of truth. They 
would have authority only in so far as their 
teaching found an echo in Christian consciousness 
itself. According to Schleiermacher it was vital 
Christian experience that was the true source and 
norm of Christian theology. The doctrines of 
the past had, consequently, for him no inviolable 
sanctity. They were to be accepted only in so 
far as they stood in a direct relation to the living 
faith of the present. What the Christian, for 
instance, should think of the Trinity and of the 
person of Christ, was not settled once for all by 
the ancient creeds. These doctrines are subject to 
revision in the light of the Christian conscious- 
ness of to-day. And so it is also with the doc- 
trines of the church in general. They must find 
both their interpretation and their validation in 
present Christian experience. Experience thus 
became with Schleiermacher an effective instru- 
ment for revising and modernizing the theology 
of the past. 


The appeal to Christian experience, however, 
may be made in the interest of theological con- 
servatism as well as theological progress. And 
this in a double way. First, in rough, pragmatic 
fashion it may be argued that the traditional the- 
ology is justified by its practical results. It is the 


- 


1600’, PRESENT “TENDENGIESTIN 


old, not new, theology that is militant and mis- 
sionary, that promotes revivals of religion, and 
that carries the gospel to the ends of the earth. 
The common intelligence responds to the older 
doctrines as it does not to the modern reformu- 
lations of them. Hence such popular religious 
movements as Pietism in Germany and Meth- 
odism in England were theologically conserva- 
tive.”?° While opposed to a rigid and lifeless 
orthodoxy, they resisted the rationalism of their 
day and also set themselves against the newer 
scientific tendencies in theology. And this has 
been true of much of the popular evangelism 
down to our own time. It is in connection with 
this movement that premillenarianism and “Fun- 
damentalism’”’ especially flourish. 

We also find in the ritualistic churches the 
same tendency to justify the traditional theology 
on the ground of its utility. Whether this the- 
ology can be rationally defended or not, it gets 
hold of the people, it “works”; and hence on the 
basis of practical experience it may be accepted. 

“On the relation of these two movements to each 
other note the following statement by A. W. Benn in 
his History of English Rationalism, i, p. 221: “The 
Wesleyan movement was essentially a German impor- 
tation. It arose from the direction given to Wesley’s 
thoughts by his intercourse with the Moravians, a 


Pietistic sect, whence it passed to the evangelical school 
within the Church of England.” 


A 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 161 


This is a common line of argument adopted by 
Catholic apologists. But it is one that manifestly 
leaves us without a rational standard. It makes 
general consequences rather than reason the test 
of truth. It is uncritical and tends toward the- 
ological obscurantism. That there is some truth 
underlying it need not be denied, but this under- 
lying truth is general in character. It applies to 
the validity of the religious nature as a whole 
rather than to that of any specific doctrinal system. 
To apply it to the latter is to bar the way to 
theological progress and to deprive the intellect 
of its legitimate rights in the field of religion. 
But there is another and more scientific way in 
which Christian experience has been made the 
basis of theological conservatism. This method 
is illustrated by the so-called “Erlanger School” 
in Germany, represented by J. C. K. Hofmann 
(1802-1875), G. Thomasius (1802-1875) and 
Fr. H. R. Frank (1827-1894). These distin- 
guished theologians took their start from Schleier- 
macher, making the Christian consciousness the 


source and norm of theology, but they interpreted 
the Christian consciousness in a somewhat nar- ' 


rower sense. They found its unique and dis- 
tinctive element in the experience of regeneration 
and conversion, and out of this experience they 
sought to deduce almost the entire orthodox 
Lutheran theology. 


162. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


The most complete and systematic exposition 
of this standpoint is found in Frank’s great work, 
entitled System of the Christian Certainty, the 
first volume of which has been translated into 
English. Frank distinguishes between the “im- 
manent,” the “transcendent,” and the “transeunt” 
objects of faith. In the first class he puts sin and 
the natural unfreedom of the will, habitual and 
actual righteousness and the spiritual freedom of 
the will, and the certain hope of ethical perfection 
and personal blessedness; in the second class we 
have the personal and triune God, the God-Man, 
and the fact of atonement; and in the third class 
are placed the church and the various means of 
grace. All of these objects of faith, according to 
Frank, belong to experimental religion. Those 
classed as “immanent” are given immediately in 
Christian experience, and those designated as 
“transcendent” and “transeunt” are implicit in 
it or are deducible from it. “If the spectral 
analysis,’ asks Frank, “has succeeded by dint of 
observing the broken light in the spectrum in 
pointing out to a certain extent the chemical con- 
stituents of the solar body; inasmuch as the sun- 
light shining around us and enabling us to see is 
no other than that which has beamed forth from 
the sun: why should it be contradictory and un- 
feasible to read in the spectrum of the regenerate 
human personality, and to recognize what that 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 163 


sun is whence the rays proceed which enter 
tireretis 

The theological program implied in this ques- 
tion is one that naturally commends itself both 
to the scientific temper of our age and to a warm 
evangelical piety. But the conclusions reached 
by Frank are quite out of proportion to the empir- 
ical basis upon which they are supposed to rest. 
The experience of regeneration and conversion 
as a mere psychical fact certainly cannot be re- 
garded as the source and ground of our belief in 
the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Indeed, 
as a purely human experience it is too unstable 
and too variable to furnish an adequate founda- 
tion for religious faith even in its most general 
form. The new birth carries with it conviction 
only insofar as it is itself a faith-construct; that 
is, only insofar as it presupposes the faith which 
it is supposed to ground. It is not Christian 
experience that creates faith, but, rather, faith 
that creates Christian experience. In any case 
the content of the Christian faith manifestly can- 
not be derived from a faith-less experience. 
Christian experience is itself simply the Christian 
faith realized and vivified. Without faith 
Christian experience would have no existence, and 
apart from experience faith would be a mere 
abstraction. One implies the other. To base 


“System of the Christian Certainty, p. 298. 


164. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


faith on Christian experience is, therefore, to base 
it on itself. The argument thus moves in a circle, 
and amounts simply to an assertion of the self- 
evidencing character of faith. 

This also holds true in a large measure of the 
effort to determine the content of faith by an 
appeal to religious experience. To what extent 
the living faith of Christian experience implies 
the traditional theology is a question that in no 
small degree depends for its answer on one’s 
own religious training and on one’s conse- 
quent conception of what the normative Christian 
experience is. It is a defect. of the “Erlanger” 
theology that it was based on too individualistic 
and too subjective a view of Christian expe- 
rience. Hofmann, for instance, said, “I the 
Christian am to me the theologian the essential 
subject matter of my science.’”’?? This position, 
it is evident, does not take adequate account of 
the degree to which religious experience is de- 
pendent upon one’s environment. The particular 
form that our Christian experience takes, or at 
least our interpretation of it, is determined to a 
large extent by the group to which we belong. 
We reflect the theological standpoint of the group, 
and hence it is easy for us to fall into the error 
of reading that theological standpoint into our 
own religious experience and finding in this expe- 





“Schrifiweis, i, p. 10. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 165 


rience the source and warrant of the theology. 
The experience justifies itself, and consequently is 
supposed also to justify the theology in connec- 
tion with which it originated. But this conclusion 
is often drawn without a critical and scientific 
examination into the exact relation of the expe- 
rience and the theology to each other. At any 
rate there can be no doubt that the experience 
of the individual furnishes no adequate ground 
for the determination of the true content of the 
Christian faith. 


It was partly to correct this one-sided subjec- 
tivism in the empirical theology of his day that 


Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1899) laid so much | 


stress on the objective and historical character. ’ 


of Christianity. The norm of Christian truth, 
he held, is to be found, not in the Christian con- 


sciousness nor in the experience of the new birth, ~ 


but in revelation. Revelation, however, as he con- 
ceived it, is no external and mechanical affair. It 
is a living process and requires for its completion 
the answering faith of the human recipient. Reve- 
lation and faith are correlative terms. One im- 
plies the other. There can be no true faith with- 
out revelation, and no true revelation without 
faith. Vital religious experience, in other words, 
is an essential factor in revelation; but it is 
secondary, not primary. The true starting point 


166 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


of theology is to be found in revelation. Here 
we have something lifted above the shifting expe- 
riences of the individual, and yet something 
positive, empirical, an objective fact that finds its 
echo and its verification in the history and the 
present experience of the church. Revelation is 
not, then, an independent entity of fixed dimen- 
sions. Its range and content are determined 
within and by experience. But the experience 
is that of the church rather than that of the 
individual; and it is derived, not original, a 
product of revelation as well as its conditioning 
ground. } 

In working out this conception of Christian 
experience and its relation to revelation Ritschl 
» developed the famous theory of value-judgments, 
which we have already briefly discussed, and also 
sought to determine the true content of the Chris- 
tian faith and the true nature of the Christian 
life. The program, which he outlined and to a 
large extent carried through, is one of the most 
clearly defined, one of the most original, and 
one of the most significant in the entire history of 
Christian theology. What he aimed to do was 
to make theology independent both of natural 
science and of philosophy, and at the same time 
to give to it and to religion an assured place in 
the thought and life of the modern world. In 
order to attain this end he naturally took his start 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 167 


from Schleiermacher’s conception of religion as 
something altogether distinct from theoretical 
knowledge. He developed the idea, however, and 
applied it to theology in an original and inde- 
pendent manner. 

First, by the theory of value-judgments he dif- , 
ferentiated theology from science more precisely | 
than had heretofore been done. The bare ques- 
tion of fact, of existence, he held, belongs to 
science. With this religion is not primarily con- 
cerned. Religion moves entirely within the field 
of value-judgments. It is concerned with the 
interpretation of facts, with their significance for 
the human spirit. The factual order established 
by science does not, therefore, ‘conflict with the 
interests of religion. Religion has to do simply 
with the purpose and meaning of the order, an 
aspect of reality that lies beyond the domain of 
science. When it comes to the question of 
miracle, there does, it is true, seem to be an 
unavoidable clash between science and religion. 
But here, too, religion is primarily concerned, not 
with the physical event, but with the meaning 
lying back of it. It is the revelation of God in 
nature that constitutes the essence of miracle 
from the religious point of view, and so long 
as the fact of this revelation is recognized in 
biblical history and in the world about us, the 
exact nature of the objective event in question 


168 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


is not a matter of vital importance. Religion has, 
therefore, nothing to fear from science. Its own 
realm of values is quite independent of the con- 
clusions reached by scientific investigation. And 
this realm is not like that of poetry, a mere 
product of the imagination. Religious values fur- 
nish as valid a basis for knowledge as does 
our perceptual experience. This is everywhere 
assumed by Ritschl. He builds on the Kantian 
doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason. 
For him and for every truly religious mind “the 
gleaming ideal is the everlasting real.” Religious 
value is not an arbitrary and unreal fact; it is 
_ itself a part of the real world, and the only key 
to ultimate reality. This, to be sure, is an assump- 
tion, but all knowledge in the last analysis rests 
on assumption. In this respect religious knowl- 
edge does not differ from scientific or theoretical 
knowledge.”® 

In the second place, Ritschl denied to meta- 
physical speculation any true religious signifi- 
cance, and in so doing differentiated theology 
more sharply from philosophy than had pre- 
viously been done. Philosophy, he held, cannot 
establish the existence of God; and even if it 


“For a more extended discussion of this point see 
the author’s article on “The Significance of Religious 
Values for Religious Knowledge,” in the Methodist 
Review for May, 1923, pp. 341-352. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 169 


could prove an intelligent First Cause of the 
world, such a God would not be a real religious 
value. What religion demands in God is holy 
love; without it God would not be God. And 
this is an attribute that lies beyond the reach of 
metaphysical speculation. It is something that 
is revealed in history, especially in the life and 
death of Christ. This revelation is ultimate. It 
stands in its own right. It needs no philosophical 
props. The fact of Christ is self-evidencing; and 
the light that streams forth from him is only 
obscured by subtle inquiries into the metaphysical 
structure of his personality and into the ontolog- 
ical distinctions that may possibly obtain within 
the Deity. The elimination of metaphysics from 
theology means, therefore, not simply that the 
Christian religion in its essential nature is inde- 
pendent of philosophy, but that Christian the- 
ology has in the past to a large degree been. 
vitiated by the unwarranted introduction of 
purely speculative elements drawn from philos- 
ophy, particularly the philosophy of the Greeks. 
The task, consequently, that confronts the the- 
ologian to-day is to purge Christian theology of 
its alien metaphysics and reduce it to a science 
founded on historical revelation. Only thus can 
the true independence of religion receive due 
recognition, and the age-long conflict between the- 
ology and philosophy be brought to an end. 


170 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


In the third place, Ritschl’s rejection of meta- 
physics not only profoundly influenced his the- 
ology; it determined to a large extent his 
conception of the Christian life. There is, he 
held, a sharp antithesis between the evangelical 
and the Roman-Catholic type of piety. The latter 
is mystical; and “mysticism,” says Ritschl, ‘“‘is 
the practice of Neo-Platonic metaphysics.’’?4 
Metaphysics of this kind makes no distinction as 
regards worth between spirit and nature. It 
puts both on essentially the same plane; both are 
things. And from its standpoint the Absolute is 
pure being without definite content. Communion 
with the Absolute, therefore, takes the form of 
a vague mystical feeling. This feeling has no 
ethical content, it is not determined by the reve- 
lation of God in Christ. It grows out of the 
supposed immediate union of the soul with the 
Divine, and does not rise above the natural plane. 
Indeed, mysticism, as Kaftan says, is simply 
“spiritualized nature religion.” It is independent 
of historical revelation. It is the kind of religious 
experience that springs up in the cloister. It 
expresses itself in passive contemplation, and 
rests on a false metaphysical conception of the 
nature of God. 

Sharply opposed to this mystical Catholic type 
of piety, according to Ritschl, is the biblical and 

“Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 27. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 171 


Protestant type. Here stress is laid on the char- 
acter of God as revealed in Christ. The God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a very dif- 
ferent Being from the God of metaphysical specu- 
lation; and communion with him, therefore, 
means something quite different also. He is a 
personal Being, with laws and purposes of his 
own and with a goal to be achieved. Communion 
with him, consequently, is possible only as we 
enter into his purposes and obey his laws. Chris- 
tian experience, in other words, is essentially 
ethical in character. It manifests itself in active 
faith, in the effort to bring in the kingdom of 
God. This does not mean, however, that Ritschl 
held that there is no direct personal relation 
between the soul and God. “It is not to be sup- 
posed,” says Herrmann, a distinguished Ritsch- 
lian, “that the difference between mysticism and 
our way of experiencing the communion of God 
is that only the mystic believes that he can feel 
himself inwardly grasped of God. That expe- 
rience is obviously the Christian’s greatest joy. 
... We differ from the mystic solely in the way 
in which we become aware that God is touching 
us.... Life in the Eternal is laid open to us when 
we understand moral necessity: and we share 
that life in the Eternal when we choose with joy, 
and of our own free will, to do what is morally 
necessary. The power that helps us to do this 


20 PRESENTER N DENG OWN 


is God.”’?° There is then, according to the Ritsch- 
lians, direct communion between the soul and 
God, but it™1s a communion historically and 
ethically mediated. It is only through the reve- 
lation in Christ and through moral obedience that 
we can have true fellowship with the Divine. 

In thus stressing the ethical element in religion 
_ Ritschl had in mind the numerous religious aber- 
_rations that have appeared in the course of Chris- 
tian history. These aberrations he attributed to 
the influence of an unchristian mysticism. And 
it was because he saw in Pietism a revival, in 
Protestant garb, of Catholic mysticism that he 
passed such severe strictures upon it. His last 
great work was devoted to a history of Pietism, 
in which he sought to establish the thesis that 
Pietism does not mark an advance beyond the 
Lutheran Reformation nor a return to it, but, 
rather, a reversion to a pre-Reformation type of 
piety. His English biographer, Robert Mackin- 
tosh, has raised a question as to “whether engross- 
ment in such a theme was the wisest disposal of 
time,” and perhaps most of us would agree that — 
it was not. But Ritschl himself regarded the 
theme as one of supreme importance. He 
thought that the very existence of Protestantism _ 
was at stake in the issue raised by Pietism. In 

“The Communion of the Christian With God, pp. 
196, 197. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 173 


this he was no doubt mistaken. His hostile atti- 
tude toward Pietism was due partly to his own 
temperament and partly to the religious condi- 
tions that prevailed in Germany in his time. 
There is, as a matter of fact, no such sharp an- 
tithesis between Catholic and Protestant piety as 
Ritschl assumed; and as for evangelical Pietism 
his criticism of it was, as Harnack says, “one- 
sided, narrow, and partisan.”’?* Nevertheless, it 
cannot be denied that in his opposition to mysti- 
cism and Pietism Ritschl set the ethical and his- 
torical element in Christianity on high as had not 
been done before, and thus gave to Christian expe- 
rience an interpretation that links it up in a 
striking way with the practical and empirical 
temper of our day. ; 
Ritschlianism is the most highly developed 
form that theological empiricism has yet taken. 
There is another and more recent expression of 
the empirical tendency in theology, to which we 
have already referred, which might seem to mark 
a step in advance, but it has not yet been suffi- 
ciently developed to take on the character of an 
independent and consistent theological system. 
Ritschl has given us the most complete, the most 
systematic, and the most thoroughgoing applica- 
tion that the empirical principle has yet received 
to theology. With him experience was both the 
*Reden und Aufsatze, ii, p. 359. 


174 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ground and the norm of Christian truth. But 
experience, as he conceived it, had certain posi- 
tive historical-and ethical limitations. It excluded 
the purely mystical awareness of God. There 
were also in his system certain exaggerations and 
one-sidednesses that exposed it to hostile attack. 
It, furthermore, failed to take adequate account 
of the history and psychology of religion. But 
in spite of these limitations it is the most suc- 
cessful attempt that has yet been made to adjust 
Christianity to the modern empirical type of 
thought. It is itself, of course, not final. It was, 
to a considerable extent, adapted to Ritschl’s own 
day, and hence is in some respects now obsolete. 
But its main principles are of abiding worth and 
constitute a permanent contribution to Christian 
thought. In a recent book, written by a Meth- 
odist theologian,?? there is a chapter entitled 
“Wesley or Ritschl,” the implication being that 
Methodists at least are under the necessity of 
making a choice between their denominational 
founder and the German theologian. “A thor- 
ough carrying out of Ritschl’s principles,” says 
this scholar, “would emasculate evangelical Chris- 
tianity, especially the Methodist branch of it.’28 
In this statement I am not able to concur. Be- 

“Professor John A, Faulkner, Modernism and the 


Christian Faith. 
*“Ibid., p. 218, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 178 


tween the fundamental principle of Ritschlianism 
and that of Wesleyanism I see no antithesis. 
Rather do I see in Ritschlianism a logical though 
inadequate development of the empirical prin- 
ciple implicit in Methodism. So instead of “Wes- 
ley or Ritschl” I should prefer to say “Wesley 
and Ritschl.” 


Experience, as we have seen in the foregoing 
discussion, serves a double function in theology, 
one apologetic, the other normative. The validity 
of both of these functions has been called in ques- 
tion, especially the first. It is, for instance, con- 
tended that the psychology of religion no longer 
permits us to find a basis for religious belief in 
experience. What in the past, we are told, has 
made possible the apologetic appeal to experience 
has been the unscientific conception of religious 
experience current among theologians. “Their 
respect for experience,’ says James H. Leuba, 
“and their use of it is of a kind with that of the 
ignorant empiric in medicine. . . . Theology has 
not yet learned the lesson writ large in the his- 
tory of psychology. It continues to bear to psy- 
chology a relation similar to that of alchemy to 
chemistry.”?® What in particular is criticized in 
the apologetic use of experience is the assumption 
that there is in religious experience in its dif- 


*4 Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 256, 259. 


176 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ferent forms a superhuman or miraculous element 
that either points to or directly apprehends a 
transcendent and divine reality. Indeed, it seems 
to be implied in Professor Leuba’s discussion of 
the subject®® that the entire empirical argument 
for religion rests upon this assumption. If, there- 
fore, religious experience in its various forms— 
practical, redemptional and mystical—can be 
accounted for without recourse to the miraculous, 
the foundation of religion is by that very fact 
undermined. The truth of religion is thus made 
dependent on the question as to whether the facts 
of religious experience can all be explained ac- 
cording to natural psychological laws or not. If 
they can be, there is no empirical ground for 
believing in God. Consequently, a truly scientific 
psychology—one that excludes the miraculous— 
spells the doom of theology. 

This argument is manifestly based upon a 
crude philosophical naturalism, but it occasionally 
finds support in the utterances of religious 
writers. For instance, in a book written about 
fifteen years ago by a representative theological 
thinker, we find this statement: “The coming 
battleground in theology will not be the field of 
speculative philosophy. . . . It will not be the 
field of criticism—neither literary nor historical 
criticism. . . . The battleground will be the field 

“A Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 207-277, 


RELIGIOUS‘ THOUGHT): 0 :°177 


of experimental psychology.’ In other words, 
according to this scholar, the vital problems in the 
theology of the future will be psychological. 
“The question,” he says, “which confronts us is: 
Is there in Christian experience something that 
is beyond the explanation of purely natural laws, 
something really divine, something produced 
directly by the Spirit of God?” If this “some- 
thing” cannot be discovered, theology, it is im- 
plied, will be discomfited. And at first this posi- 
tion would seem to be justified by our traditional 
evangelical phraseology. The distinction between 
the “natural” and the “spiritual” man, the idea 
of the new birth, and that of “the witness of the 
Spirit” would seem to point unmistakably to 
superhuman elements in Christian experience— 
elements, which, if real, ought to be capable of 
experimental verification. But at this point there 
is danger of one’s falling into error through 
failure to distinguish between the religious and 
the psychological use of such terms as “natural” 
and “supernatural.” In the psychological use 
of the terms stress is laid on the idea of a fixed 
natural order, any departure from which 1s 
“miraculous” and in that sense “supernatural” 
or “superhuman.” In the religious use of the 
terms, on the other hand, “natural” denotes, not 
a fixed psychical order, but a certain quality of 
life, by way of contrast with which the higher 


178 “PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


life of the spirit may be said to be a life above 
nature and in this sense a life having in it “super- 
natural” and “superhuman” elements. These 
superhuman elements, however, in Christian 
experience do not necessarily involve the “mirac- 
ulous” in the psychological or scientific sense of 
the term. Conversion, the “witness of the 
Spirit,” and the experiences of the mystic may 
all come about in perfect harmony with natural 
psychological laws, and yet may be ascribed to 
a divine source. The causal agency never mani- 
fests itself as such in the flow of psychic phe- 
nomena. To the “natural” eye it remains for- 
ever hidden. A psychological microscope turned 
upon the experiences of a saint would as little 
reveal God as would a telescope directed toward 
the heavens. The idea, that the presence of a 
Divine Agent in Christian experience would neces- 
sarily manifest itself in a psychological miracle 
is simply_a relic of a crude naturalistic meta- 
physics. }The Christian’s conviction of the 
Divine Presence rests upon the quality of his 
experience and not upon its want of harmony 
with natural law.! Such an attempt as that made 
by Professor Leuba to discredit theology on the 
ground that it is based on the unscientific assump- 
tion of a miraculous element in Christian expe- 
rience, grows out of a misunderstanding of what 
a sound empirical theology really teaches. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 170 


Another point concerning which there has been 
considerable confusion among students of the 
psychology of religion is the relation of religious 
experience to faith and especially the relation of 
faith to mysticism. Faith and religious expe- 
rience are sometimes spoken of as though they 
were independent entities, more or less opposed 
to one another. Professor Leuba, for instance, 
says, “If the fundamental truths of religion are 
either immediately given in inner experiences or 
induced from them, one does not see why some- 
thing additional called faith should be a neces- 
sary condition of religious belief. ... To say that 
it is by faith that these experiences are laid hold 
of and accepted seems a denial of the qualities 
of immediacy and unimpeachableness claimed for 
them.”*? This statement is a good illustration 
of the blindness of some psychologists to the 
unique character of religious experience and to 
the conditions of cognition in general. Faith, of 
course, is not something “additional” to religious 
experience. The two are, rather, aspects of one 
and the same experience. Religious experience 
implies faith, and faith becomes real only through 
religious experience. Just as sense experience has 
its conditioning and mediating factors, so it is 
also with religious experience. Religious expe- 
rience has in faith its conditioning ground, and 


*A Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 261, 262. 


180 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


would be impossible without it. It is, therefore, 
a manifest error to separate religious expe- 
rience from faith and treat it as an independent 
entity and as an independent ground of religious 
belief. 
’ An analogous error appears in some of the cur- 
rent discussions of the relation of faith to mys- 
ticism. Here we come upon two different the- 
ories concerning religious experience. According 
to one all valid religious experience takes the 
form of faith. There are, it is said, no religious 
intuitions. There is no immediate apprehension 
of the Divine. The experiences of the mystic are 
illusory. “What discredits the mystic’s theory,” 
says G. A. Coe, “is that it accepts as immediate 
intuition what is palpably an interpretation.”*? 
In this statement and also in the utterances of 
many mystics it is apparently implied that there 
really is such a thing as “immediate intuition” or 
“immediate experience’ which contains no ele- 
ment of interpretation. But this, as we have seen, 
is a mistake. It is an idea that belongs to the 
pre-Kantian type of thought. All experience, 
Kant has taught us, is interpreted experience. 
There is no knowledge of objective reality that 
is not mediated. What we call “immediate expe-- 
rience” in the sense world is all of it the product 


“The Sources of the Mystical Revelation,” in the 
Hibbert Journal for January, 1908, p. 367. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 181 


of the mind’s interpretive activity. The fact that 
the mystic’s experience is an interpretation makes 
it, therefore, no less immediate and no less valid 
than is sense experience. Both forms of expe- 
rience are interpretations, and the important 
thing in each case is simply the question as to 
whether the interpretation is correct or not. Now, 
in the mystical experience as well as in religious 
experience in general the determining factor 1s 
faith. It is not the mystical experience that cre- 
ates faith but, rather, the reverse. And in this 
sense Professor Coe is right in saying that “the 
mystic brings his theological beliefs to the mys- 
tical experience; he does not derive them from 
it.” But this by no means discredits the mys- 
tical experience, and still less does it discredit 
the theological beliefs. The beliefs generate the 
experience, but the experience in turn confirms 
the beliefs. Between the two there is a relation 
of mutual dependence. “Christian belief,’ as 
Bishop F. J. McConnell says, “is both root and ; 
fruit of Christian life.”*8 The living experience 
of the mystic grows up out of faith, but it also 
vivifies and verifies the faith from which it 
springs. ‘Faith-state and mystic state are prac- 
tically convertible terms.”** 

*Religious Certainty, p. 194. 

“William James, The Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence, p. 424. 


182 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


It is, then, a mistake to establish a sharp line 
of demarcation between faith and mysticism. No 
doubt different types of religious experience are 
represented by those who stress one of these fac- 
tors and those who stress the other. The faith- 
experience takes either the practical or the re- 
demptional form. The latter is represented by 
the Pauline Epistles, and the former by the 
synoptic Gospels and the Epistle of James. The 
mystical experience, on the other hand, is com- 
monly depicted as a simple and distinct type, 
but it ought, as J. B. Pratt points out,*° to be dif- 
ferentiated into a milder and a more extreme 
form. The milder form appears in the Johan- 
nine writings, and ought to be regarded as a con- 
stituent element in Christian experience. In any 
case it does not stand opposed to the faith-expe- 
rience, nor is this true even of the more extreme 
form of mystical experience. The mystical ex- 
perience in all its forms, insofar as it has a 
definite content, either consciously or uncon- 
sciously presupposes faith; and the faith-expe- 
rience, when it is vivid and coupled with a lively 
imagination, almost inevitably takes a more or 
less pronounced mystical form. That the aware- 
ness of the Divine Presence is the goal of 
Christian experience would probably be generally 
admitted. The only question is as to the way by 


“The Religious Consciousness, pp. 337ff. 


Eg Se 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 183 


which this goal is to be achieved. The faith- 
philosophy stresses the moral will; mysticism 
places its emphasis upon feeling. But religious 
feeling implies faith quite as much as does the 
moral will, so that in the last analysis the mystical 
as well as the practical type of religious expe- 
rience finds its source in faith. But this by no 
means destroys its evidential value. For faith 
is its own justification. The efforts, consequently, 
that have been made to break the force of the 
apologetic appeal to religious experience by deny- 
ing its immediacy and its miraculous character 
must be regarded as beside the mark and futile. 


I just said that faith is its own justification. 
By this I mean that it is a basal and elementary 
activity of the human mind. It is, as Dean Inge 
says, “something deeper, more universal, more 
fundamental, than anything that can be assigned 
to the independent activities of the intellect, will, 
or feelings.”°° Its validity, therefore, cannot be 
deduced from anything else. It stands in its own 
right, and that right consists in “the psychological 
necessity which obliges us to assign values to our 
experience. ” “Faith,” as Lotze says, “is-the-feel- 
ing that is appreciative of value’; and this feel- 
ing or instinct is rooted in human nature. It | 
cannot be proved or disproved; it is simply an | 


*Faith and Its Psychology, p. 42. 


104) PRESENT “LENDENCIESIIN 


‘elementary and ultimate endowment of the mind. 
It is in this fact that the true basis of the apolo- 
getic appeal to religious experience is to be found. 
_ Religious experience is the concrete expression of 
faith and as such shares in its self-evidencing 
character. It represents an independent prin- 
ciple in human life that in the last analysis neither 
needs nor can find an external support. It thus 
justifies itself. 

To recognize this fact is by no means a con- 
fession of weakness on the part of religion, but, 
rather, the reverse. Rationalists naturally have 
difficulty in seeing this. A. W. Benn, for in- 
stance, speaks of “the principle of an inward 
light” as “that phosphorescence of religious belief 
in decay.” ‘No rationalist,” he says, “ever said 
more than that religious belief was a subjective 
illusion; and to dwell on the self-evidencing 
power of faith comes perilously near to an admis- 
sion that the rationalist is right.’”’?’ The very 
reverse, however, is the case. For religious faith 
to find its justification in itself is an evidence of 
its own strength and vitality. It is a declara- 
tion of independence on its part as over against 
philosophy and science, and an assertion of its 
own right to self-determination. This view, 
furthermore, cuts the ground from under the 
rationalistic attack upon religion. It refuses to 


“History of English Rationalism, ii, p. 7531, Qua 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 185 


admit that there is an external rational standard 
by means of which the truth of religion can be 
judged. It insists that in and through faith we 
have an insight into reality deeper and truer than 
that afforded by the perceptive and logical faculty. 
Indeed, it goes a step farther. It holds that 
“reason” itself in the last analysis is dependent 
for its validity on faith. No knowledge of ob- 
jective reality would be possible without faith in 
the intelligibility of the world and faith in our 
ability to understand it. This faith, however, we 
cannot demonstrate; we simply accept it as im- 
plicit in our mental life; all our natural science 
assumes it. It is, then, evident that science as 
well as religion holds to the autonomous validity 
of faith. There is a scientific faith and a moral 
faith as well as a religious faith. Each repre- 
sents a fundamental need of the human spirit and 
each stands in its own right. The law actually 
followed by the human mind is thus stated by 
Bowne: ‘Whatever the mind demands for the 
satisfaction of its subjective interests and ten- 
dencies may be assumed as real in default of 
positive disproof.’’** This holds true in religion 
and ethics as well as science. The self-verifying 
power of faith is a fundamental principle of our 
entire mental life. It is not peculiar to religion; 
and its apologetic use by religion is not only the- 
“Theism, p. 18. 


186 PRESENT TENDENCIES: IN 


oretically sound, it is an indication of religious 
vigor and self-confidence. 


The appeal to experience as a ground of reli- 
gious belief may, then, be accepted as valid, But 
what is to be said of experience as the norm of 
Christian belief? In an apt and suggestive figure 
Bishop F. J. McConnell has compared the method 
actually followed by men in the acquisition of 
beliefs to “the principle of eminent domain.”*® 
According to this political principle the govern- 
ment appropriates whatever piece of land or prop- 
erty is needed for the common good. Ina similar 
way the spiritual needs of men lead them to appro- 
priate whatever beliefs seem necessary to satisfy 
those needs and to promote the religious life. 
Life thus has the right of way. When it comes 
to religious conceptions it exercises a kind of 
right of eminent domain. It has always been so 
in the history of religious thought. Life has been 
the driving force. The great theological systems 
have primarily aimed to meet the needs of life 
rather than of speculation. And if so, it would 
seem that life or experience ought to he the norm 
or test.of religious truth. But “life” and “expe- 
rience” are by no means simple concepts. Chris- 
tian experience is complex, and it is variable. It 
is the effect of beliefs as well as their cause. Be- 





“Religious Certainty, p. 9. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 187 


tween experience and belief there is a continual 
interaction. Experience is the more basal of the 
two, but it is itself being constantly fashioned. by 
traditional belief. To erect experience into an 
independent critic of belief is, then, manifestly 
impossible. 

Nevertheless, we accept Schleiermacher’s prin- 
ciple that theology should be a scientific exposition 
of Christian experience or the Christian con- 
sciousness. This ideal is one that has never been 
realized and probably never will be. Between 
Christian experience and systematic theology 
there always has been and always will be more 
or less of a parallax. Unwarranted speculative 
elements creep into theology, and Christian expe- 
rience itself is constantly undergoing changes, so 
that it is necessary continually to readjust the 
church’s theology to meet the needs of the chang- 
ing Christian consciousness. The process will 
never be complete. Still the principle, which 
makes experience the norm of theology, is both 
valid and fruitful. It tends to keep theology and 
life close together. It puts a check on barren 
theological speculation. When, for instance, a 
Protestant scholastic tells us that “theology 
teaches that there is in God one essence, two pro- 
cessions, three persons, four relations, five no- 
tions, and the circumincession which the Greeks 
call perichoresis’—we are quite confident that 


188 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


whatever other merits this theology may have, it 
is not empirical. 

Again, theological empiricism relieves the be- 
liever of the burden of accepting traditional doc- 
, trines that stand in no living relation to the 
Christian consciousness of to-day. It is, to be 
sure, often no easy matter to decide whether a 
particular doctrine has value for our time or not. 
On points of this kind good and able men differ. 
But. gradually in such matters the Christian con- 
sciousness makes itself felt. It draws the line 
between the essential and the nonessential. Out- 
grown beliefs it discards; old beliefs that can be 
reinterpreted in the life and thought of to-day it 
reconstructs; and those that still make a direct 
appeal to the human mind and heart it emphasizes 
anew. Thus the empirical principle, although 
unable to set up a definite and independent stand- 
ard, proves itself to be a progressive force in 
theology. It surrenders nothing that is of vital 
importance, but it retains nothing that is a burden 
to the Christian conscience. At the same time it 
strengthens the ground of Christian certainty by 
locating it in life itself where it is within the 
reach of all and where it can be constantly 
renewed. | 

“Technically,” as Bowne finely says, “our faith 
- does not admit of demonstration. .. . But it does 
admit of being lived; and when it is lived, our 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 189 


souls see that it is good, and we are satisfied that 
it is divine.’’*° 

““Gains for Religious Thought in the Last Genera- 
tion” in Hibbert Journal (1909-10), p. 893. 


1909 }=6r PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


CHAPTER IV 


REASON AS A BASIS OF RELIGIOUS 
BELIEF 


Tus chapter might be entitled “Rationalism” 
or “Neo-Rationalism.” It has to do with that 
tendency in modern thought which finds in reason 
rather than experience the test of truth and which 
judges religious belief according to its conformity 
or nonconformity with this standard. This does 
not mean that reason is necessarily opposed to 
experience or that it is independent of it. The 
two really belong together. Science, for instance, 
the great radiating center of our modern thought 
world, is both empirical and rational. It bases its 
conclusions both on experience and reason. In- 
deed, the terms “empirical”? and “rational” are 
sometimes used interchangeably. The empirical 
method is said to be the only rational one, and the 
rationalistic standpoint, we are told, requires us 
to follow the lead of experience. Professor 
Wilm, for example, tells us that he has nowhere 
seen the rationalist position expressed more clearly 
and briefly than in the statement that “there is 
only one method of knowledge, that of experience 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 191 


and legitimate inference from experience.’’* 
Rationalism and empiricism would thus seem to 
be fused together. And it is true, as we have 
already pointed out, that at the beginning of the 
modern era the revolt against ecclesiastical and 
biblical authority took the double form of an 
appeal both to reason and to experience. The facts 
of experience and the laws of reason became the 
ultimate standards of truth, the courts of final 
appeal; and to a large extent they remain such 
to-day. They constitute the two foci in the 
ellipse of modern thought. 

But while there is thus a certain kinship 
between reason and experience, and while the two 7 
to a certain extent involve each other, there has 
at the same time always been a tendency to subor- 
dinate one to the other. The result has been the 
rise of the two opposing schools of thought, 
known as the empiricistic and the rationalistic. 
Empiricism, as we have seen, holds that expe- 
rience is the sole source and ground of knowl- 
edge. Rationalism, on the other hand, contends 
that there are certain principles of reason that 
cannot be deduced from experience and that have 
their warrant in themselves. The conflict between 
these two schools goes back to the ancient Greeks ; 
the question that divides them is one of the per- 
sistent problems of philosophy. In the course of 


*Methodist Review, May, 1921, p. 342. 


‘ 


192" PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the long debate between them there has been much 
confusion of thought and much vain beating of 
the air. The terms “experience” and “reason” 
have, as a rule, not been clearly defined, and the 
issue consequently has often not been sharply 
drawn. The two schools have represented ten- 
dencies rather than fixed bodies of doctrine. But 
these tendencies have been significant. Each has 
had an important bearing on religious belief, and 
each has called forth an analogous movement in 
the field of theology. There is a theological ra- 
tionalism corresponding to philosophical rational- 
ism just as there is an empirical theology corres- 
ponding to philosophical empiricism. 

In the last lecture we considered the religious 
problem created by modern experientialism. If 
experience takes the place of objective authority 
of every kind as the test of truth, what becomes 
of religious belief? Can Christianity justify it- 
self before the bar of experience? The answer, 
we saw, to this question depends on the view we 
take of experience. Traditional philosophical 
empiricism so construed experience as practically 
to eliminate religion. It restricted cognitive expe- 
rience to the sense plane and insisted that there is 
no experiential basis for the belief in the reality 
of the self. In view of these facts we can hardly 
agree with William James that it was “through 
some strange misunderstanding” that empiricism 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 193 


came to be associated with irreligion. At least 
the misunderstanding did not consist in ascribing 
irreligious consequences to the traditional type 
of empiricism. If there was any misunderstand- 
ing, it is to be found in the empiricistic concep- 
tion of experience. An “experience” that leaves 
no place for a real self and that denies inde- 
pendent cognitive value to any form of experience 
that rises above the sense plane, manifestly fur- 
nishes no basis for religious belief. Hume, as 
we have already noted, did say that “the cause 
or causes of order in the universe probably bear 
some remote analogy to human intelligence,” but 
he added that this conclusion “affords no infer- 
ence that affects human life, or can be the source 
of any action or forbearance.” In other words, 
it furnishes no basis whatsoever for real religion. 
From the standpoint of Humian empiricism all 
mystical experience is illusory, and the beneficial 
effects of religion have no epistemological signif- 
icance; no matter how important these effects 
may be, they do not establish the truth of religion. 
Traditional empiricism is thus in its very essence 
hostile to religion. Its destructive conclusions 
appear, as we have seen, in such a work as that 
by Professor Leuba on the psychology of re- 
ligion. Nevertheless, the word “empiricism” has 
strangely not suffered the same fate as the word 
“rationalism.” It has not fallen into disfavor 


194 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


in religious circles. The odium theologicum has : 


not come to be attached to it. This may perhaps 
be due to the conviction on the part of religious 
thinkers that the Humian type of empiricism is 
based on an arbitrary and unwarranted concep- 
tion of experience, and also to the instinctive 
feeling on the part of religious people that re- 
ligion and experience are so closely related to 
each other that such a word as “empiricism” 
ought not to be surrendered to the enemy. 

In any case the effort has been made in recent 
years to enlarge the scope of cognitive experience 
and make it include both mystical and “prag- 
matic’ experience. The most important repre- 
sentative of this tendency is William James. He 
saw in mystical states “windows through which 
the mind looks upon a more extensive and in- 
clusive world”; and he also found the chief test 
of truth in the fact that it “works.” The prac- 
tical consequences of religion had, therefore, for 
him a very important bearing upon the question 
of its truth, and so also did the experiences of 
the mystic. Both types of experience had for 
him cognitive value. Empiricism, as he under- 
stood it, was thus favorable to faith and might 
very well “become associated with religion.” 
Indeed, it had been associated with religion long 
before his time. Through the Reformers, the 
Pietists, Schleiermacher, the Erlanger School, 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 195 


Ritschl and others it had been introduced into 
theology. More and more Protestant theologians 
for a century past have been stressing the self- 
evidencing power of faith. Religious experience 
for them justifies itself just_as truly as does 
sense experience. Some may stress the “imme- 
diacy” of the mystical experience, and others the 
inferential certainty of the pragmatic type of 
experience, but in the end it amounts to the same 
thing in both cases. Bishop Thoburn, a mystic, 
met the arguments in favor of atheism to which 
he had been listening, by calmly saying that he 
himself had “known” God for forty years, and 
that these arguments consequently had no effect 
upon him.” But another man with a less vivid 
sense of the Divine Presence might be no less 
sure of God. “A sedentary life,” says Nietzsche, 
“ts the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only 
those thoughts that come by walking have any 
value.” It is through life, through walking, that 
we arrive at truth in the practical realm. “Act 
as though I were and you will know that I am” 
were the words from above that came at one 
time to a doubting soul, bringing faith and 


*It is an interesting and significant fact that Tertul- 
lian, writing about 200 A. p., makes the statement that 
“the majority of men derive their knowledge of God 
from visions.” See W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism, 
p. 16. 


196 6 PRESENT ‘FENDENCIES@IN 


assurance. Both the conviction and the vision of 
God are born of life, and both are self-verifying. 

Christian experience, then, is the ground of 
belief, and it is also its norm. It constitutes the 


standard by which both the beliefs of the past and ” 


the new ideas of the present are to be judged. It 


is thus both a progressive and a conservative 
force. It helps us to slough off the useless past, 
and it also protects us against the discordant and 
hostile present. Its service in both directions 
has been significant, but it has perhaps been 
greater in the direction of maintaining the unique- 
ness and integrity of Christianity than in that of 
‘accommodating it to its modern environment. 
There are in Christian thought two tendencies at 
work. One is concerned with establishing a syn- 
thesis of Christianity with modern culture, the 
other is intent on maintaining what Werner Elert 
calls the “diastasis” of the two, their separateness 
and distinctness. Both of these ends have to 
some extent been promoted by theological empiri- 
cism, but it is especially the latter that it has 
encouraged. Pietism, Schleiermacher, the Er- 
langer School, Ritschl, all in their way have 
insisted on the independence of Christianity and 
sought to isolate it from its secular environment. 
They have found in Christian experience some- 


"Der Kampf um das Christentum seit Schletermacher 
und Hegel, p. 3. 


a 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 197 


thing unique and self-evidencing. They have, 
therefore, welcomed the challenge of modern 
thought to transfer the case of religion from the 
court of authority to that of experience. Chris- 
tianity, they were persuaded, had nothing to fear 
from such a transfer. So the transfer was made, 
the cause was pleaded, and Christianity to-day 
feels itself as firmly anchored in experience as 
science itself. This we sought to bring out in 
the preceding lecture in our study of the empirical 
tendency in religious thought. 

Now, quite different in some respects from 
this tendency is the appeal of modern thought to 
reason, which we are to consider to-day, espe- 
cially in its bearing on religion. 

First, it may be noted that as a philosophical 
theory rationalism is more favorable to religion 
than is empiricism. Empiricism, as we have seen, 
in its traditional form furnishes no basis for the 
belief in God or that in immortality. Rather does 
it tend to undermine both. It denies the reality 
of the self, and by its limitation of valid cognitive 
experience to the sense realm deprives faith in 
God of experimental support. A consistent philo- 
sophical empiricism of this type would thus mean 
the overthrow of religion. Rationalism, on the 
other hand, has always contended for at least the . 
partial independence of the human reason. Locke, 
the empiricist, declared that there is nothing in 


198 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the intellect which was not previously in sense, 
to which Leibnitz, the rationalist, added “except 
the intellect.” That is, the intellect has a nature 
of its own; it is not a “blank tablet.’ And insofar 
as this line of thought was developed, rationalism 
tended to furnish a basis for the belief in the 
reality and the high destiny of the self. Then, 
too, rationalism has usually held to the possibility 
of proving the existence of God. Indeed, it has 
elaborated imposing arguments in favor of this 
belief. Some, it is true, have in the name of 
reason denied the cogency and validity of these 
arguments. But rationalism has at least left the 
door open to them, and, as a matter of fact, they 
are still rendering important service in the way 
of maintaining religious faith. 

In the next place it may be noted that in spite 
of the foregoing fact the term “rationalism” has 
fallen into disfavor among religious people as 
the word “empiricism” has not. An irreligious 
connotation has come to be associated with ra- 
tionalism, so that with many to call a man a 
“rationalist” is about equivalent to calling him 
an “infidel” or even “atheist.” A. W. Benn, for 
instance, defines rationalism as “the mental habit 
of using reason for the destruction of religious 
belief.” And even among theologians “rational- 
ism’’ carries with it more or less of a negative 
implication. This is perhaps due in part to his- 


——— ee ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 199 


torical causes, such as the use of the term to 
designate the arid type of religious thought cur- 
rent in Germany during the latter half of the 
eighteenth century; but it also has its ground in 
the fact that reason as commonly understood 
stands less closely related to religion than does 
experience. Religion in its essential nature is 
an experience; the rational element in it is subor- 
dinate. Then, too, religious experience is more 
directly dependent on history than is reason. It 
draws its nourishment to a large extent from the 
past, and so is interested in maintaining the con- 
tinuity of the faith. Without this historic con- 
tinuity it would almost certainly lose its own 
vitality. ‘Religion,’ as Schleiermacher says, 
“begins and ends with history.’’ The conscious 
historic life of mankind is the soil out of which 
religion grows. Religious experience is thus 
rooted in history and hence instinctively takes a 
reverent attitude toward it. In this respect it is 
conservative. Reason, on the other hand, tends 
to be radical. However dependent it actually may 
be on the past, it is not itself aware of it in the 
way that religion is. It is inclined to assert its 
independence of history and to cut loose from 
tradition. The result is that in the field of re- 
ligion rationalism has not infrequently been a 
devitalizing force. It has broken that connection 
between religion and history which is essential 


200 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


to a vigorous religious life, and consequently has 


itself come to be looked upon with suspicion. 
A third point of contrast between rationalism 


_ and experientialism is found in the fact that, while 


the latter, as we have noted, is disposed to assert 
the “diastasis” of Christianity and modern cul- 
ture, the former is favorable to a synthesis of 
the two. This follows naturally from what was 
said in the preceding paragraph concerning the 
different attitudes taken by reason and experience 
toward history. Reason is less inclined than 
experience to recognize the authority of the past. 
It also differs from experience in that it lays more 
stress on the general than on the particular. What 
it values most in a thing is not that which is 
peculiar to it but, rather, that which it has in 
common with other things. What it looks for is 
the law that binds things together. It is the univer- 
sal element in the world in which it is interested. 
This is characteristic of the scientific and rational- 
istic type of mind as distinguished from the his- 
torical and empirical. The latter is interested in 
the particular and the individual. It stresses, 
consequently, the uniqueness of Christianity, its 
independence of modern culture. Rationalism, 
on the other hand, tries to bring Christianity into 
harmony with modern thought. The marvelous 
and miraculous in Christianity it overlooks or 
eliminates. What it is concerned about is to 


a ae > ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 201 


prove the reasonableness of the Christian religion, 
its complete conformity with the rational stand- 
ards of our own day. It thus has a levelling 
influence. It tends to secularize Christianity ~ 
rather than to Christianize the world. At least 
this is the peril in the rationalistic movement. 
Rationalism tends to become synonymous with 
naturalism. Ta ee 


But rationalism is a complex movement. Just 
as “experience” and “empiricism’’ have various 
meanings that need to be distinguished, so it is 
with “reason” and “rationalism.” It is hardly 
safe in clear thinking to use either term unless it 
be accompanied by a chaperon. As _ regards 
“reason” it is important to distinguish between 
the “theoretical” or “logical” and the “practical” 
or “moral” reason. “It is a pity,” says W. R. 
Inge, “that we have not accepted Coleridge’s dis- 
tinction between reason and understanding, cor- 
responding to the German words Vernunft and 
Verstand, and (less exactly) to the Greek nous 
and dianoia as used by the Platonists. ‘Reason’ 
would then be used for a philosophy of life based 
on full experience, a synthesis doing justice to the 
claims of the moral and zsthetic consciousness, 
while ‘understanding’ would be reserved for 
logical reasoning of a more abstract kind.”* As 


‘Faith and Its Psychology, p. 75. 


202) PRESENT TENDENCIES SEN 


it is, “reason” is used in both senses and often 
with no clear discrimination between them. In 
the case of “rationalism”? we have already made 
a distinction between the “philosophical” and the 
“theological” type; but within each of these there 
is also an important distinction to be made. 
Within philosophical or epistemological rational- 
ism we need to distinguish between the earlier 
doctrine of innate ideas and the Kantian idea of 
the creative or constitutive activity of thought. 
According to the earlier doctrine there are certain 
ideas born within us. They are not derived from 
experience; they are part of the mind’s original 
equipment. Such, for instance, is the idea of 
God. We do not receive it from without, we do 
not create it; it is innate in human reason, and 
derives its validity from that fact. But in this. 
form the rationalistic theory was untenable. Psy- 
chological inquiry of the most searching char- 
acter failed to find in the human mind any ideas 
that could be called innate in the sense in which 
the term is commonly understood. So this form 
of rationalism gave way to the Kantian. Accord- 
ing to Kant there are no “innate” ideas, but there 
are in the mind certain immanent principles or 
categories without which experience would be im- 
possible. These principles do not reveal themselves 
in consciousness; they belong to the unconscious 
mechanism of the soul, and yet they are essential 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 203 


to consciousness. Without the categories of 
space, time, substance, quality, cause we could 
have no experience in the proper sense of the term. 
Experience does not create the categories, the 
categories create experience; and yet the cate- 
gories do not exist as ideas or independent prin- 
ciples apart from experience. They are, rather, 
implicit in experience, and constitute its “formal” 
background. They owe their origin, however, not 
to sense, but to reason, and hence are a priori in 
character. Indeed, they form the very structure 
of reason, so that “rational” and “a priori” are 
practically synonymous terms. It is this type of 
philosophical rationalism that has been current 
since the time of Kant. 

In the field of theological rationalism it is im- 
portant to distinguish between intellectual or 
logical rationalism and ethical rationalism. These 
two types of rationalism are quite distinct from 
each other, and it is doubtful if the same term 
ought to be used to designate both. Yet they 
agree in this that they take a critical attitude 
toward traditional religion. In this sense the 
Hebrew prophets were ethical rationalists. So 
also were Jesus and Paul. These men sharply and 
sternly criticized the traditional religious ideas 
and customs from the standpoint of conscience. 
They insisted on the complete moralization and 
spiritualization of religion. But their method 


204)" PRESENT TENDENCGI BS Ea 


was “intuitional” rather than “rational.” What 
impelled them to their task was not reflection, not 
the logic of the situation, but a spontaneous moral 
urge, a spiritual fire. They were seers, not 
philosophers; preachers, not critics. Hence one 
has the feeling that there is a certain impropriety 
in speaking of them as rationalists. The great 
representative of ethical rationalism is Immanuel 
Kant. It was he who in the realm of speculation 
first championed the autonomy of the moral 
reason, asserted its primacy over the intellect, and 
made it normative in the field of religious belief. 
He found both the source and justification of 
religion in the moral nature of man, and judged 
the historic or positive religions almost exclu- 
sively from the ethical point of view. The result 
was that he did not give adequate recognition to 
the distinctive nature of religion, and in his own 
theological conclusions departed rather far from 
traditional Christianity. There is, therefore, a 
certain fitness in designating him a “rationalist.” 
The same designation has also been applied to 
Ritschl, but with less justification. Ritschl did 
stress the ethical element in religion, and also re- 
interpreted Christian theology to a large extent 
from this standpoint; but he at the same time 
emphasized the distinctively religious factor so 
strongly and was also so manifestly anti-intel- 
lectualistic in his main tendency that it seems 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 205 


inappropriate to speak of him as a rationalist, even 
though the term be used in an ethical sense. 
Rationalism carries with it a certain intellec- 
tualistic flavor and does not exist in its purity 
without it. Of the two forms of theological 
rationalism, the ethical and intellectual, it is, there- 
fore, the latter that represents the more character- 
istic type. It is with it that we shall chiefly deal. 


During the long authoritarian period of the 
church’s history reason was theoretically subordi- 
nated to the authority of the church or the Bible 
or both, but it nevertheless played an important 
role in the theoretical defense of the faith and in 
its systematic elaboration. The metaphysics of 
this period was rationally rather than empirically 
grounded, and so also was its theology. Both 
followed the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, 
so far as this did not conflict with revelation. In 
the early Greek Church the standpoint of faith 
and that of reason were harmonized by a com- 
paratively simple formula: “The Logos is the 
divine reason; this Logos became flesh in Christ; 
Christianity is, therefore, the historical manifes- 
tation of the absolute divine reason and conse- 
quently the temporal embodiment of eternal 
truth.”® Inthe medieval period Thomas Aquinas 
distinguished between “natural” truths, that may 


‘Ludwig Lemme, Chrisiliche Apologetik, p. 29. 


206,’ PRESENT TENDENCIES TN 


be apprehended and established by reason, and 
“revealed” truths that lie beyond reason but 
which may still be shown not to be contrary to 
reason. Now and then there were outbreaks of 
skepticism on the part of theologians. Men like 
Tertullian, Duns Scotus and Luther emphasized 
the conflict between faith and reason, and made 
their philosophical skepticism a ground for 
asserting the principle of biblical or ecclesiastical 
authority. But on the whole the prevailing ten- 
dency in the thought of the church during its 
authoritarian period was to regard reason and 
philosophy as the handmaid of faith and the- 
ology. 

But when the idea of an objective and external 
standard of truth was rejected by modern 
thought, the situation was changed. Reason now 
became not only independent of faith but its rival. 
Revelation was subordinated to reason and the- 
ology to philosophy. This tendency is repre- 
sented by theological rationalism. “Rationalism” 
is commonly applied in a distinctive way to the 
type of theology dominant in Germany during 
the latter half of the eighteenth century. But it 
may also properly be used to designate the deistic 
movement in England, Hegelian intellectualism, 
and the religious apriorism of Ernst Troeltsch and 
the so-called “history-of-religion” school. It is 
with the last-named movement that I am especially 


- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 207 


concerned, but in order to understand it we need 
to recall the main facts relative to the earlier 
forms of rationalism. 

Theological rationalism, as we have already 
observed, has on the whole been less favorable 
to historic Christianity than theological empiri- 
cism, less sympathetic with its particularism, and 
less inclined to acknowledge its claim to unique- 
ness and absoluteness. But it has in each of its 
forms varied greatly in the degree of its diver- 
gence from the traditional Christian faith. Some 
of its representatives have stood much closer to 
the church than others; some have been its 
servants and others its enemies. Among them 
all, however, there has been a tendency to dispute 
the miraculous element in Christianity, to under- 
estimate the importance of the historical and the 
personal in religion, and to lay undue stress on 
general ideas. This tendency appears as clearly 
in the deistic movement as in any of the later 
phases of rationalism. Deism, though not con- 
fined to one country nor to any particular period 
of time, was most prominent in England, and that 
during the latter part of the seventeenth and the 
first half of the eighteenth century. It is cus- 
tomary to refer to Lord Herbert of Cherbury 
(1583-1648) as the “father” of the movement. 
He reduced the essential ideas in religion to five: 
(1) there is one supreme God; (2) it is our duty 


208 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


to worship him; (3) true worship consists chiefly 
in virtue and piety; (4) we ought to repent of sin, 
and (5) there are rewards and punishments here 
and hereafter. These ideas were supposed to be 
common to religions generally and to be inherent 
in human reason. They were consequently ac- 
cepted as the basis of natural religion, the religion 
of reason as opposed to revealed religion, There 
was later a tendency to whittle them down. Some 
deists, like Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), left no 
place for the duty of worship as distinct from 
the performance of duties to one’s fellow men, 
and ignored altogether the belief in immortality. 
They thus practically eliminated the second and 
fifth articles from Herbert’s creed. Indeed, some 
deists took such a negative attitude toward religion 
that it was not uncommon to speak of a man as 
“a deist and an atheist’ without any conscious- 
ness of the contradiction involved in the two 
terms. In general, however, Herbert’s five ar- 
ticles were regarded as the charter and creed of 
deism, insofar as the latter had any positive 
religious character. 

Deism was in part a reaction against the reli- 
gious wars and the bitter conflict between Chris- 
tian confessions that followed the Reformation. 
These strifes brought with them not only religious 
decay but a distrust of biblical authority and a 
feeling of the irrationality of religion in its his- 


RELIGIOUS. THOUGHT 209 


toric form. Here were different Christian sects, 
all appealing to the same authoritative book and 
yet engaged in a most unchristian conflict with 
each other. This conflict was itself irrational. 
The very fact of its existence tended to cast dis- 
credit on the idea of “revelation”? and to make 
timely the appeal to reason. The Bible instead 
of allaying discord apparently inflamed it. Must 
there not, then, be some principle superior to the 
letter of Scripture, which will enable men to dis- 
tinguish between the essential and the nonessential, 
and so tend to compose the differences between 
them? And if so, where is this principle to be 
found if not in human reason? Such questions 
as these men began to ask, and in this way arose 
the religion of reason as distinguished from the 
religion of revelation. Revelation might still be 
accepted as a fact, but its validity was acknowl- 
edged only insofar as it agreed with reason. This 
was the purport of a famous work by John 
Toland (1670-1722) called Christianity Not Mys- 
terious. It was also the thesis that underlay a 
still more famous work by Matthew Tindal, pub- 
lished in 1730 and entitled Christianity as Old as 
the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of 
the Religion of Nature. This book was known 
as the “Deist’s Bible.” According to it “Chris- 
tianity is as old as the creation only if it reechoes 
deism, but if it add anything to natural religion, 


B10)’ PRESEN DOTENDENCG iar ia 


it is an upstart and impostor.”® What is called 
revelation, therefore, contributes nothing new and 
is really superfluous. Our sole and sufficient 
guide in life is reason or the light of nature; and 
what was meant by reason was simply the com- 
monly accepted ideas of the time. These ideas in 
the field of religion were the five announced by 
Herbert, more or less abbreviated. But the more 
attention came to be directed to these ideas, the 
more evident it became that they were simply an 
excerpt from the Christian catechism and that as 
independent principles they had no secure foun- 
dation either in pure experience or pure reason. 
Hume and Kant made this clear once for all. 
Deism, as a matter of fact, was from the begin- 
ning a parasitic growth. It drew its life from 
the historic faith which it sought to displace, and 
the more independent it became of this faith the 
more precarious became its own existence, until 
finally it perished through its own weakness. Its 
decline was hastened by the Humian and Kantian 
criticism and especially by the new vitality im- 


parted to historic Christianity by the Wesleyan — 


Revival, but apart from these external influences 
its decay was inevitable. As a religious move- 
ment deism was falsely grounded and never had 
self-sustaining power. 

*John Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 
P. 85. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 211 


The book by Matthew Tindal above referred to 
was translated into German in 1741 and served as 
a connecting link between English deism and Ger- 
man rationalism. The latter movement flourished 
during the second half of the eighteenth century. 
While akin to deism and historically related to 
it, it had its own distinctive character. For one 
thing it stood closer to the church than did Eng- 
lish and particularly French deism. Indeed, it 
was distinctly a movement within the church. It 
was consequently more sympathetic with organ- 
ized and historic Christianity. Then, too, its 
representatives were far more learned than the 
English deists. Men like J. S. Semler (1725- 
1791), called the “‘father” of German rationalism, 
J. G. Eichhorn (1752-1827), and H. E. G. Paulus 
(1761-1851) were distinguished biblical scholars 
—indeed, pioneers in the field of modern biblical 
science. They were intimately acquainted with 
Scripture and sought to interpret it in such a way 
as to commend it to the people of their own day. 
But in doing so they yielded more to the deistic 
standpoint than the Christian consciousness was 
prepared for. Miracles they rejected, though not 
with the same bluntness that some of the deists 
had. They tried to interpret the biblical miracles 
in harmony with natural laws and so continued 
to hold to the historic credibility of Scripture. ~ 
According to Eichhorn “the falling of the walls 


aie PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


of Jericho represents the effect of a sudden 
assault, along with a shout, when the marching 
around six times had put the garrison off their 
guard; and the escape of Jonah is possibly the 
result of his alighting on the back of a sea 
monster that carried him to the shore.”* Paulus 
explained the miraculous feeding of the multitude 
by the theory that Jesus “set those who had food 
the example of giving to those who had none, 
by doing so himself with the small portion which 
he had.”® The resurrection he accounted for by 
saying that Jesus did not really die but had a 
fainting spell. Still he retained a high view of 
Jesus’ character and mission. In his later years he 
once said of Jesus that he “was a wonder, though 
not a miracle, like a meteoric stone, coming from 
a higher world, and leaving its mark in this.”® 
This reverent attitude toward Jesus and toward 
the Bible was characteristic of German rational- 
ism, but the movement as a whole nevertheless 
betrayed the same tendency to subordinate reve- 
lation to reason that we find in deism. Lessing 
(1729-1781) put the idea underlying this ten- 
dency into a notable statement, one that has been 


‘John Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 
D, 163. 

“John F. Hurst, History of Rationalism, p. 172. 

*John Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 


p. 192. 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 213 


declared to be the hardest blow ever struck historic 
Christianity. “The accidental truths of history,” 
he said, “can never become the proof of necessary 
truths of reason.” Essentially the same idea was 
also expressed by Kant when he said that “the 
historical serves for illustration, not for demon- 
stration.’’*° In these statements it is implied that 
absolute truth exists only in the form of logically 


demonstrated truth or in that of necessary truths - 


of reason. History is “accidental” and at the 
best an illustration or symbol of truth. Historical 
revelation, therefore, can have nothing final about 
it. It may serve as a means of education, but ulti- 
mately it is destined to be superseded by the light 
of reason. Reason is the only true source and 
ground of religion. But reason, as commonly 
understood, is cold, logical, utilitarian. As such 
it runs counter to the genius of religion. Religion 
is watm, enthusiastic, idealistic. Theological 
rationalism, consequently, became a synonym for 
shallowness, impotence, unbelief. It failed to 
meet the deepest needs of the Christian spirit, and 
a revolt inevitably took place in the interest of 
a more vital type of religious thought and life. 


It was Schleiermacher who led the revolt, 
though he was aided by the idealistic type of 


*See E. Troeltsch, Das Historische in Kant’s Reli- 
gionsphilosophte, pp. 131, 134. 


= 


214°) PRESENT (TENDENCIES aw 


ethics introduced by Kant. With Schleiermacher, 
as we have already pointed out, religion was 
primarily a matter of feeling, of vital experience. 
But hardly had he launched the new empirical 
theology, when another form of rationalism 
appeared upon the scene. Hegel (1770-1831) 
was a severe critic of traditional rationalism. He 
regarded it as superficial both intellectually and 
religiously. The antithesis which it had estab- 
lished between history and reason was from his 
standpoint baseless. So also was its rejection of 
the characteristic doctrines of Christianity such as 
the Trinity and the incarnation. Eighteenth- 
century rationalism had attempted to bring about 
a synthesis between religion and modern culture 
by surrendering the distinctive elements in Chris- 
tianity. This to Hegel seemed a mistaken method. 
He instead sought to raise the modern thought 
world to the level of Christianity and to unite 
them both in a higher synthesis. In so doing he 
rendered an immense service to the Christian 
faith. It is to him as well as to Schleiermacher 
and the pietistic movement in England and Ger- 
many that we owe the reinvigoration of Chris- 
_tianity in the modern world after it had to a 
considerable extent fallen into decay. ‘“Hegel’s 
apology for Christianity,” says Werner Elert, ‘‘is 
the most brilliant but also the last synthesis in 
heroic style that has been ‘attempted between 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 215 


Christianity and science.”!1 “Hegel’s philosophy 
of religion,” he also says, “is the most exalted 
hymn to Christianity that was ever sung in the 
world of science.”!? And in its aim this is no 
doubt true. Nevertheless, Hegel himself intro- 
duced a new form of rationalism, which in. its 
turn threatened to be fatal to historic Christianity. 
He rejected, it is true, the older antithesis between 
history and reason. He saw in history the un- 
folding of the divine reason, so that history was 
to him an expression of reason rather than its 
negation; and he saw also in Christianity the 
absolute religion. For him the doctrines of the 
Trinity and the incarnation were embodiments 
of the highest philosophic truth. The existence 
of the Absolute, as he conceived it, took on a 
trinitarian form through its externalization in the 
world of nature and its reestablished unity in the 
life of the spirit. And the goal of the universe, 
according to his philosophy, consisted in that per- 
fect union of the human and the divine realized 
in the incarnation. 

But while history in general and Christianity 
in particular were thus, so to speak, legitimized 
by the Hegelian philosophy, there were still 
points of kinship between Hegelianism and the 
older rationalism which it transcended. Both, for 

“Der Kampf um das Christentum, p. 35. 

*Ibid., p. 34. 


216) PRESENT; TENDENCIES IN 


instance, held to an intellectualistic conception of 
religion. Hegel found the essence of religion, 
not in feeling, but in knowledge, “absolute knowl- 
edge’; and the earlier rationalists thought of 
true religion as consisting in the acceptance of a 
certain attenuated creed. It was the rational con- 
tent of religion that both emphasized rather than 
its experiential and vital side. Then, again, 
while Hegel found in philosophy a'confirmation of 
historic Christianity, there was, after all, implied 
in his apologetic a subordination of faith to 
reason akin to that of eighteenth-century.ra- 
tionalism. For Hegel faith was not self-verify- 
ing; it found its justification in philosophy. He 
insisted, it is true, that the content of religion and 
philosophy is the same and that they differ only 
in form. But the form that truth takes in phi- 
losophy (Begriff) he regarded as superior to 
that which it takes in religion (Vorstellung), and 
hence he held that the tendency is to translate 
Vorstellung (imaginative representation) into 
Begriff (concept) until finally religion is merged 
into philosophy. It is philosophy, not religion, 
then, that, according to Hegel, represents the 
ultimate form of truth; and the same may also 
be said of its content in spite of his protestations 
to the contrary. With him Christianity was the 
absolute religion only insofar as it expressed in 


a symbolic or imaginative form the essential ideas — 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 217 


of his own philosophy. In the last analysis it 
was speculation, not revelation, that constituted | 
with him the source and test of truth. 

At first the Hegelian philosophy powerfully 
reenforced historic Christianity. It satisfied the 
religious demand for objective reality more com- 
pletely than did the teaching of Kant and Schleier- 
macher. But before long the negative elements 
latent in the system began to manifest themselves. 

[ Hegel had identified thought with being; this was * 
the fundamental presupposition of his philosophy. | 
But the identification had not been and could not 
be thoroughly grounded. Hence one of his dis- 
ciples, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), broke the 
connection between the two, and treated the whole 
idealistic and spiritual side of Hegelianism as a 
subjective play of thought without counterpart in 
the world of reality. Christianity and religion 
in general he regarded as a mere illusion. Hegel 
had also identified the idea of the incarnation with 
the person of Christ, but he had done so without 
a thorough investigation of the historical sources. 
Hence it was possible for another of his disciples, 
David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), to discon- 
nect the two and to seek to show that the historic , 
Jesus was a very different being from the Christ 
of faith. “The Idea,” he said, “loves not to pour 
all its fullness into one example, in jealousy 
toward all the rest. Only the race answers to the 


216) (PRESENT TENDENCIES mi 


Idea.”’ Concerning the Jesus of history he tells 
us that we know very little, and what little we 
know could not be made the basis of a religion. 
It is the Christ of faith on whom Christianity is 
founded, and he is simply a creation of the Chris- 
tian imagination. Christology, according to 
Strauss, is therefore mythology, an illusion. The 
sublime idea of the union of humanity and divinity 
is quite independent of its realization in the life 
of a single individual. 

A somewhat less extreme position was taken 
by another Hegelian theologian, Alois Bieder- 
mann (1819-1885). Biedermann distinguished 
between the principle of Christianity and the per- 
son of Christ. Absolute predicates are to be 
ascribed only to the former. Yet, according to 
Biedermann, it was in the historic Jesus that the 
Christian principle of divine sonship first received 
clear expression, and it was through this living 
embodiment of it that the principle became effec- 
tive in the life of humanity, so that “the sig- 
nificance of Jesus for Christianity as a whole is 
not external and accidental but internal and per- 
manent.”** This acknowledgment, however, of 
_the religious importance of Jesus does not con- 
ceal the fact that in the distinction between the 
principle of Christianity and the person of Christ 
we have another instance of the subordination of 


“Christliche Dogmatik (second edition), ii, p. 592, 


~ ——— ee 


ee ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 219 


the historical and personal to the rational and 
speculative. And this we cannot deny is in line 
with the prevailing tendency of the Hegelian phi- 
losophy, however it may differ from the master’s 
original intention. He may have aimed at “the 
spiritualization of history,’ but the theological 
movement he initiated tended inevitably toward 
“the emancipation of the spirit from history’’** 
and so toward a new type of rationalism more or 
less hostile to historic Christianity. 


As eighteenth-century rationalism was followed 
by the empirical theology of Schleiermacher, so 
Hegelianism was succeeded by Ritschlianism. The 
Ritschlian theology and its immense influence 
down to our own time we considered in the pre- 
ceding lecture. As a corrective of Hegelian in- 
tellectualism and as an effective response to sci- 
entific naturalism it rendered a signal and abiding 
service to Christian thought. But it had its own 
limitations. It tended unduly to isolate Chris- 
tianity. Isolation to a certain extent is desirable 
and necessary, if the uniqueness and absoluteness 
of Christianity are to be maintained. Christianity 
cannot be dependent for its existence on the favor 
of philosophy and science; it must stand in its 
own right. Nor can it consent to be merged in 
the general religious nature of man; it must main- 


“Werner Elert, ibid., p. 117. 


220 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


tain its distinctness from other religions or lose 
its missionary character. But this does not mean 
that Christian theology can afford to be indif- 
ferent to philosophy and to other religions. How- 
ever independent and _ self-confident Christian 
experience may make us, we cannot blind our eyes 
to the fact that our faith has philosophical and 
historical implications that need to be defended 
against hostile attack. The simple believer need 
not concern himself with these problems, but the 
theologian must. It will not suffice in matters of 
this kind to appeal to the self-verifying power of 
faith. The common reason in such questions has 
its rights. No matter how much Christianity 
may desire to keep itself free from entangling 
alliances with metaphysics and historical science, 
it cannot wholly succeed in doing so. It must 
justify itself to. the world as well as to itself. 
This fact Ritschl and his immediate followers 
did not adequately recognize. So out of what 
may be called the left wing of his school there 
arose a new movement, more disposed to take 
account of philosophy and particularly of the his- 
tory and psychology of religion. This movement 
is known as the “religio-historical’ or “history- 
of-religion” (religionsgeschichtliche) school. It 
is represented in the biblical field by such men as 
Herrmann Gunkel, Hugo Gressmann, and Wil- 
helm Bousset, and in the field of systematic the- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 221 


ology by men like Ernst Troeltsch and Rudolf 
Otto. Troeltsch is the outstanding figure in the 
group, and is sometimes spoken of as the sys- 
tematic theologian of the movement,’® though a 
few years before his death (January, 1923) he 
passed over from the field of theology to that of 
the philosophy of religion and never devoted him- 
self to the task of working out a system of 
theology. He was profoundly influenced by both 
Ritschl and Schleiermacher, but the general ten- 
dency he represented was such that his theological 
position may not improperly be described as “neo- 
rationalism.” 

This latest form of rationalism, with which 
we are more particularly concerned in the present 
lecture, agrees with the older rationalism in two 
main respects. First, it rejects miracle and along 
with it all claim to exclusiveness and supernatural 
authority. But its reasons for so doing are 
somewhat different from those that obtained in 
the past. There is, of course, the same pressure 
to-day as heretofore coming from the scientific 
conception of the uniformity of nature. This 
conception is steadily gaining in strength with 
the progress and spread of scientific knowledge 
and is making the belief in miracle increasingly 
difficult. But aside from the psychological 


*See The American Journal of Theology for 1913, 
p. I. 


222 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


pressure thus exerted upon us the rejection of 
miracle has been differently grounded from time 
to time. During the deistic period the world was 
thought of as a self-running mechanism. It had 
been created by God, but after that, as Carlyle 
says, he sat apart and simply watched it go. There 
was no reason why he should interfere with its 
orderly processes. To do so would imply a defect 
in the mechanism and in his own creative work. 
Furthermore, science was making it increasingly 
clear that all the facts of life can be explained 
by natural law. There is, therefore, no ground 
for believing in divine interventions. The belief 
is irrational. And so long as nature was regarded 
as sufficient unto itself, there was considerable 
force in this line of argumentation. 

But with the rise of German idealism and the 
doctrine of the divine immanence the situation 
was changed. Nature no longer offered a bar- 
rier to the divine activity. Apart from the divine 
reason it had no existence. It was. itself the 
direct expression of the divine thought. The 
middle wall of partition between it and the Abso- 
lute was broken down. God was in the world as 
its ever-present cause and ground. With this 
conception of the relation of God to the world 
introduced by modern idealism one might have 
supposed that the Hegelian rationalists would 
take a more indulgent attitude toward miracles 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 223 


than had their deistic predecessors. But such 
was not the case. The Hegelian Absolute was a 
God of law. His processes were dictated by an 
inner and irreversible logic. The logic, it is true, 
was that of the spirit rather than that of a blind 
metaphysical necessity, but it was none the less 
dominated by a necessity of its own. The neces- 
sity of logic was as fixed and unalterable as was 
the logic of necessity. No place was, conse- 
quently, left for the miraculous. Hegelian ideal- 
ism might see in the biblical miracles a spiritual 
meaning that deistic naturalism did not; but as 
actual events they were excluded as rigorously 
by the former as by the latter. The latter saw 
in them misunderstood natural events, while the 
former tended to regard them as myths. In both 
cases they were rejected because of the demands 
of a metaphysical system. 

At present the rejection of miracles rests upon 
a somewhat different basis. Neo-rationalism, as 
represented by Troeltsch, is not necessitarian in 
its metaphysics; it is, rather, personalistic. But 
it is not on that account any less thoroughgoing 
in its exclusion of the miraculous; if anything, 
it is more so. It seeks to remove the last vestige 
of “supernaturalism’” from biblical history and i 
from theology. But it rests its case on the phi- 
losophy of history rather than on metaphysical 
theory. History, it contends, is all of one piece. 


224) (OP RE SENT TE NDENOTES ain 


The laws that operate in it are universal. Juda- 
ism and Christianity constitute no exceptions to 
the rule. We cannot allow miracles in their his- 
tory unless we allow them elsewhere. If we deny 
miracles in “profane” history, as most Christians 
do, we must also deny them in “sacred” history. 
There is no real line of demarcation between 
profane and sacred. Both in their outward for- 
tunes and in their thought-life the Israelites were 
subject to the same laws as other peoples, and 
their own development both politically and intel- 
lectually was to a large degree determined by 
their environment. No Chinese wall shut them 
off from other nations. Both Judaism and early 
Christianity belong to the weave of universal his- 
tory. They partake of its relativity. Nothing 
final and absolute can be found in them. Nor 
was it necessary that miracles be performed in 
those early days in order to create faith. One of 
the eighteenth-century deists, Thomas Chubb 
(1679-1747), used to argue that Methodism made 
converts without them, and hence primitive Chris- 
tianity may have done the same.!® To this it has 
been replied that the new birth is itself a miracle 
of grace and as such an attestation of the truth 
of Scripture. But on this point also neo-rational- 
ism is equally firm in its anti-supernaturalism. It 
rejects the conversion-theology of the Erlanger 


“See John Cairns, ibid., p. 93. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 226 


School even more positively than it does the reve- 
lation-theology of Ritschl. In both types of the- 
ology it sees the remnant of an obsolete authori- 
tarianism. For the neo-rationalist there is noth- 
ing either in Christian experience or in biblical 
history that is miraculous and hence absolutely 
authoritative. Human life as a whole, both ob- 
jective and subjective, is of the same weave and 
under the same law of development. There is, 
therefore, no place left for exclusiveness and abso- 
luteness on the part of Christianity. The belief 
in miracles belongs to the past. 

A second point of agreement between the new 
and the old rationalism is to be found in the re- 
ligious significance that both attribute to philos- 
ophy or to the natural reason, though in this 
respect they differ only in degree from the older 
orthodoxy. The importance ascribed to philos- 
ophy, particularly the philosophy of history, by 
Troeltsch was in the nature of a reaction against 
Ritschl’s exclusion of metaphysics from theology 
and his.disregard of the comparative study of 
religions. Herrmann went so far as to say that 
“it makes no difference to a Christian whether 
philosophically he is a materialist or an idealist.” 
One may, in a word, be an atheist with the head 
and yet a Christian with the heart. But this 
leaves us in an impossible dualism, a dualism that 
is both theoretically and practically unwarranted. 


a 


226. PRESENT TENDENCIES TN 


Man is a unitary being, and as such what he 
thinks in one realm must have a bearing on what 
he thinks in another. Faith and reason cannot re- 
main in perpetual discord, nor can they be com- 
pletely indifferent to each other. Experience it- 
self makes this clear. ‘The decisive battles of 
theology,” as A. J. Balfour says, “are fought be- 
yond its frontiers. It is not over purely religious 
controversies that the cause of religion is lost or 
won. The judgments we shall form upon its 
special problems are commonly settled for us by 
our general mode of looking at the universe; and 
this, again, insofar as it is determined by argu- 
ments at all, is determined by arguments of so 
wide a scope that they can seldom be claimed as. 
more nearly concerned with theology than with 
the philosophy of science or ethics.’’*" It is, then, 
a matter of vital importance to religion whether 
the dominant philosophy be materialistic, posi- 
_tivistic, or idealistic. A spiritual philosophy is a 
mighty bulwark of faith. No one who ever sat 
at the feet of a philosopher like Borden Parker 
Bowne could have any doubt as to the immense 
service which philosophy can render the Christian 
faith.1® To the average mind nature is a barrier 


“The Foundations of Belief, pp. 2f. 
*See the author’s article on “Bowne as Teacher 
and Author,” in The Personalist for July, 1920, pp. 


5-14. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 227 


between the soul and God. It exists in lumpish 
externality to all thought, and makes difficult a 
rational and living appreciation of the Divine 
Presence. But all this is changed by a personalis- 
tic philosophy. Nature from its standpoint takes 
on a new look. It ceases to be mere being and 
becomes speech. The power not ourselves is 
transformed from blind force to personal will. 
The whole universe comes to be charged with new 
meaning and purpose. The old contradictions 
and discords are removed. The ideal and real are 
united in one consistent view. Behold, all things 
are made new. It would be difficult to describe 
the effect which Bowne’s exposition of this truth 
had upon those who heard him. It proved to. 
them a veritable gospel, a deliverance from intel- 
lectual bondage. Their spirit was released from 
the leaden weight of a crude realism or mate- 
rialism or pantheism. What the doctrine of justi-» 
fication by faith meant to Luther’s religious life, 
that did a personalistic metaphysics mean to their | 
intellectual life. It wrought for them their intel- 
lectual redemption. And what was true of Bowne 
has been true of other great Christian philos- 
ophers. Their work has rendered an incalculable 
service to faith. In recognizing this fact ra- 
tionalism represents a sounder standpoint than 
does Ritschlianism with its positivistic bent. 
Philosophy, it is true, which begins as a friend 


228 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


of faith, may later become its rival. The history 
of rationalism furnishes illustrations of this. 
Deism, as its name suggests, was a theistic philos- 
ophy, but it later became not only a rival but an 
enemy of the Christian faith. Hegelian idealism 
aimed to establish the absoluteness of Christianity, 
but it actually subordinated religion to philosophy 
and in the hands of some of Hegel’s followers 
was used either to brand all religion as illusion 
(Feuerbach) or to justify a distinction between 
the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith 
(Strauss) or between the principle of Chris- 
tianity and the person of Christ (Biedermann) 
that was hostile to historic Christianity. Some 
of our neo-rationalists also leave us in about the 
same position. Bousset and Otto, for instance, 
base their theology on the philosophy of J. F. 
Fries (1773-1843).19 According to this phi- 
losophy the fundamental ideas of religion—God, 
freedom, and immortality—are implications of 
the pure reason. Indeed, there is only one reason, 
the theoretical. Kant’s distinction between the 
practical and theoretical reason was a mistake. 
Our basal ideas are a “‘necessary constituent of 
the one homogeneous reason.” Reason demands 
a “necessary synthetic unity in the nature of 
things,” and this unity can be realized only in 

*See Studies in Philosophy and Theology, edited by 
E. C. Wilm, pp. 110-118. 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 229 


the realm of spirit. God, freedom, and immor- 
tality are thus valid deductions from the nature 
of reason itself. They have a rational justifica- 
tion that lifts them above the contingency of his- 
tory. Bousset, it is true, insists that these ideas 
are not to be regarded as the independent basis 
of a new religion of reason. They are, he says, 
“wholly abstract ideas which by themselves alone 
can never become vital, which, however, uncon- 
sciously or consciously—and usually uncon- 
sciously—lie at the basis of all vital religion as 
aprioristic elements.”*° Vital religion is a his- 
toric growth. Reason as such cannot conjure 
into being a religion. Yet, according to Bousset 
and Otto, particularly the former, it is in the 
theoretical reason that the basis and norm of 
valid religion are to be found. Religion, then, 
does not contain its truth in itself; it does not jus- 
tify itself; it finds its justification in an abstract 
metaphysical system that lies outside of or under- 
neath it. This is essentially the same conception 
as that which underlies the older rationalism. It 
makes the historical element in religion purely 
symbolic and secondary, and opens the road to a 
new natural religion. With this position Troeltsch 
does not agree. He spurns the idea of a religion 
of reason. “A religion,’ he says, “based on 
philosophy is an illusion which is dissolved when 


*Theologische Rundschau, 1909, p. 439. 


230)" PRESENT ‘TENDENCIESUN 


we see how the religious elements of philosophies 
were actually derived from the great historical 
religions, attd when we observe how impotent is 
any religious cult which is purely individual and 
intellectual.”’** The philosophy of history, as 
represented by Troeltsch, ties religion up so 
closely with history that it leaves no room for a 
conflict between “positive” and ‘natural’ religion. 
Still, in traditional religion there are, as a matter 
of fact, both rational and irrational factors, and 
it is the rational factor that is the spring of 
progress and the norm of religious truth. So 
that “reason,” after all, has its place in Troeltsch’s 
grounding of religion and in his determination 
of its true content. Religion, as he conceives it, 
does not lie beyond the reach of the common 
reason. This is the abiding truth of rationalism, 
both new and old. 


We have noted two points of agreement be- 
tween the new and the old rationalism: their 
rejection of miracle and their favorable attitude 
toward the philosophy of religion. But while 
there are these resemblances between them, there 
are also important differences. 

For one thing, they disagree in their conception 
of the nature of religion. The older forms of 
rationalism were intellectualistic. They made re- 


“American Journal of Theology, 1913, p. 10. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 231 


ligion primarily a matter of knowing. They 
found its essence in a creed or a general world- 
view. But the new rationalism has learned from 
Schleiermacher and Ritschl, and from the psy- 
chology and history of religion. “It is,” says 
Troeltsch, “one of the clearest results of all his- 
tory of religion and all ps,chology of religion 
that the essential thing in every religion is not 
dogma or idea, but worship and fellowship, liv- 
ing communion with God.”?? 

Essentially the same view is also elaborated by 
Rudolf Otto in his justly famous book, entitled 
Das Heilige. This book bears the subtitle, “Con- 
cerning the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine 
and Its Relation to the Rational.” Otto finds the 
“irrational” and unique element in religion in the 
experience of “the holy’ or the awareness of the 
divine. The word “holy” in its ancient Semitic. 
sense had almost the same meaning as the word 
“divine,” but in the course of time it took on an 
ethical connotation.2? Hence in order to express _ 
as precisely as possible the primitive unmodified — 
religious experience Otto invents the word “numi- 
nosum,”’ deriving it from the word numen 
(divinity, or Divine Being). The “numinous” 


*Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkett Jesu fiir den 
Glauben, p. 25. 
*See my Religious Teaching of the Old Testament, 


PP. 137-153: 


232 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


then is the sense of the divine. He further char- 
acterizes this unique religious sense as “myste- 
rium tremendum et fascinosum.” It is a feeling 
of mystery, awe-inspiring yet fascinating. Here, 
according to Otto, is something original and un- 
derived in religion. It is not a rational idea nor 
a perception in the strict sense of the term; it is 
a matter of feeling rather than knowing. Yet it 
has its cognitive side; it consists in an immediate 
awareness of a supernatural reality. It is conse- 
quently in the mystical experience that the true 
genius of religion expresses itself. 

In this respect both Otto and Troeltsch, it may 
be noted, follow the lead of Schleiermacher rather 
than Ritschl. But the point of chief moment is 
that their mystical conception of religion carries 
with it a significant curtailment of the function 
of reason in religion. The older rationalism 
made the idea fundamental and the experience 
secondary: first the religious thought and then 
the religious feeling. But this order is rejected by 
both Otto and Troeltsch. Otto makes the “irra- 
tional” factor in religion as fundamental and inde- 
pendent as the “rational’’; and Troeltsch denies 
to the rational factor any conscious existence an- 
terior to its embodiment in experience. Neo- 
rationalism thus makes a very important conces- 
sion to theological empiricism. 

_ Another point of difference between the new 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 233 


and the old rationalism is to be found in their 
attitude toward history. The older rationalism 
deliberately subordinated history to reason. To 
some extent this is also true of neo-rationalism. 
Even Troeltsch subscribes to Kant’s dictum that 
“the historical serves only for illustration, not for 
demonstration”; and Bousset is quite explicit in 
declaring that history furnishes us simply symbols 
of religious truth. Jesus was such a symbol and 
nothing more. Whether he actually existed or 
not is a matter of comparative indifference. The 
important thing is not what he was but what he 
symbolized. It is the principle of Christianity, 
not the person of Christ, that alone is significant 
for faith. We need not, therefore, be disturbed 
by the conclusions reached by critics relative to 
biblical history. The most negative results would 
not necessarily affect true religious faith. For in 
reason faith has a storm-free port, sheltered from 
the winds of criticism. So Bousset argues. But 
while our neo-rationalists thus share to a consid- 
erable degree in the traditional rationalistic depre- 
ciation of history, they have a much greater 
appreciation of the importance of the historical 
and social factor in the practical religious life of 
men than did their predecessors. Whatever may 
be theoretically true of the relation of history to 
reason, they are agreed that actually religion must 
be a spontaneous historical growth. The deistic 


234) (PRESENT | TENDENGIE SAIN 


idea of a new and independent religion of reason 
they altogether renounce, whether it be based on 
philosophy er on the common content of all reli- 
gions. “This picture of a common content of all re- 
ligions,” says Troeltsch, “is a mistaken idea which 
an accurate knowledge of the history of religions 
completely refutes” ;? and a purely philosophical 
religion 1s wholly illusory. Rationalism cannot, 
therefore, set itself up as a rival of positive re- 
ligion. If it is to accomplish its aim, it must 
“bore from within.” 

Then, again, it is worthy of note that while 
Bousset and Otto, following Fries, hold that the 
fundamental religious ideas can be deduced from 
the abstract speculative reason, Troeltsch contends 
that they are in a sense evolved by history. They 
are objectively given in the historical development 
of mankind and must be slowly and carefully dis- 
entangled from the empirical flow of events. How 
this is to be done no one can say. There is no 
absolute standard by means of which the norma- 
tive and valid can be distinguished from the psy- 
chological and factual. But the distinction must 
nevertheless be made, if there is to be such a thing 
as religious truth. In any case, religious truth 
is inextricably bound up with history, and to erect 
it into an independent and absolute speculative 
system would be to deny the facts of its origin. 


_ “American Journal of Theology, 1913, p. 10. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 235 


Religious ideas do not produce religious history; 
they are, rather, produced by it. 

This somewhat more conservative attitude 
toward history manifests itself also in Troeltsch’s 
view of Jesus. In 1910 there was published in 
Germany a book, entitled The Christ Myth, in 
which the author, Arthur Drews, an Hegelian, 
sought to disprove the existence of Jesus. It was 
the author’s conviction that “the ‘Jesusism’ of 
historical theology is in its deepest nature irre- 
ligious, and that this itself forms the greatest 
hindrance to all real religious progress.” In the 
interest of religion itself, therefore, he felt that 
“this romantic cult of Jesus must be combated 
at all costs, but that this cannot be done more 
effectively than by taking its basis in the theory 
of the historical Jesus from beneath its feet.’?° 

The book caused a great stir in religious circles 
in Germany. Public debates on the subject were 
held in the larger cities, and scores of pamphlets 
were published dealing with the question. Vir- 
tually all properly equipped scholars rejected 
Drews’ theory, declaring that there is no reason- 
able ground for doubting the historical existence 
of Jesus. But not a few of them took the same 
position as Bousset, namely, that the question 
is not one of vital significance to the Christian 
faith. Even if the existence of Jesus should be 


*The Christ Myth, pp. 18f. 


236 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


disproved, the idea or principle of Christianity 
would remain, and this, they said, is the only 
essential thing. 

In connection with this controversy Troeltsch 
wrote a lecture on “The Significance of the His- 
toricity of Jesus for Faith,” in which he presented 
an interesting mediating theory. He admitted 
that in the abstract our modern Christian faith 
in God is not necessarily tied up with the person 
of Christ. Redemption, as we conceive it, is an 
inner work of grace wrought afresh in every soul 
by God. It is not, therefore, dependent upon an 
objective historical act. All that it implies con- 
cerning Jesus is that in him we have a true 
revelation of God. The important thing, how- 
ever, is the revelation, not the revealer. The 
latter is like the scaffolding, no longer necessary 
after the completion of the building. He may, it 
is true, still serve an important function as a 
symbol of the truth revealed through him. But 
he is no integral element in faith itself; and it is 
conceivable that faith might continue without him. 
“The assertion of the nonexistence of Jesus,” 
says Troeltsch, “is no doubt a monstrosity, and 
the assertion also that the main outlines of his 
preaching cannot be known is a gross exaggera- 
tion.” But the possibility at least of such con- 
clusions as these must be admitted, and it must 


“Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu, p. 4. 


ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 237 


also be conceded that in the abstract the Christian 
faith in God is detachable from the person of 
Christ. “It is,’ says Troeltsch, “the inner victory 
of our souls wrought through the greatness of 
the prophetic-Christian faith in God that brings 
about the recognition of Jesus rather than the 
reverse,”’?7 

But while Troeltsch conceded as much as this 
to the position taken by Bousset and others, he 
was even more emphatic in insisting that or- 
ganized Christianity cannot exist without the 
belief in the historicity of Jesus. If this belief 
were given up, Christianity would certainly dis- 
integrate. This conclusion he based not on any 
christological dogma but on a socio-psychological 
law. Religion, he says, is primarily not a creed 
but a social institution. It consists not ina dogma 
or an idea but in worship and fellowship; and 
these spiritual religions are possible only insofar 
as they have a center in some prophetic per- 
sonality. In the lower natural religions national- 
ity or tribal feeling may serve as a uniting bond. 
But in the higher faiths worship and fellowship 
must find their organizing center in a person. It 
is so with Christianity. History makes this per- 
fectly clear. Without Christ there would be no 
Christianity. “So long as there is a Christianity 
in any sense whatsoever, it will be bound up with 


*Ibid., pp. 14f. 


238 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the central position of Christ in worship.’’?% In 
other words it will be Christocentric. There is 
not the slightest ground for believing that religion 
will ever be purely individualistic in the sense of 
dispensing with public worship and fellowship. 
And there is also not the slightest ground for 
believing that in our Western civilization Jesus 
will ever be displaced from the position of re- 
ligious supremacy which he now occupies. His 
“heartbeat goes through and through the whole 
of Christendom just as the vibrating of the ship’s 
engine can be felt in every corner of a great 
vessel,’’"*? In the religious field his leadership is 
practically undisputed, and such it will continue 
to be so long as religion remains a vital interest 
in our Western world. The significance attached 
to him will wax and wane with the growth and 
decline of religion. The two in our civilization 
belong indissolubly together. For us it is “either 
Christ or no one.” 

We thus have in Troeltsch’s christology an 
interesting parallel to Kant’s treatment of the 
belief in God. In the Critique of the Pure Reason 
the great Konigsberger apparently demolished the 
theistic faith, but in the Critique of the Practical 
_ Reason he restored it. So Troeltsch from the 
standpoint of abstract speculation eliminates 


“Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu, p. 20. 
“Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, ii, p. 847. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 239 


Christ as a constituent factor in our religious 
faith, but in his religious sociology he reinstates 
him in a place of central importance. He affirms 
on the basis of a socio-psychological law that 
Christ is essential to vital and organized religion 
in our Western world. The christology which 
was rejected as theoretically unsound is thus made 
practically valid. The church as a living insti- 
tution, we are told, implies and requires it. This 
does not necessarily mean that Christianity is the 
absolute religion. On this point Troeltsch’s phi- 
losophy of history did not permit him to go so 
far as Hegel. What may happen in the distant 
future we do not know. It is possible that our 
Western civilization may be overthrown, and in 
that case, according to Troeltsch, religion would 
probably find a new center. For the present, 
however, Christianity is the highest form of 
religion, and it will remain such so long as our 
American-European culture survives. Christian- 
ity, to be sure, is itself no fixed entity. It is 
subject to the law of change. Its essence varies 
from age toage. Still, it has its permanent center 
in Christ, and the Christian religious faith may 
be defined as “‘faith in the divine regeneration of 
man who is alienated from God—a regeneration 
effected through the knowledge of God in 
Christ.”2° In this definition no christological 


” American Journal of Theology, 1913, p. 13. 


240 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


dogma is implied. The law by which the religious 
supremacy of Christ has been established applies 
to other religious founders as well. We cannot, 
therefore, according to Troeltsch, claim for him 
absolute uniqueness, or Deity in the proper sense 
of the term. 

But in this connection the question naturally 
arises as to whether the socio-psychological law 
invoked by Troeltsch could have resulted in mak- 
ing Christ the living center of the Christian 
religion if this position had not been warranted 
by his own personality. There are those who say 
that it is a mere accident that our religion is 
called Christianity, just as it is an accident that 
this country is called America. As this country 
might more properly be called Columbia, so our 
religion might more accurately be called Paulan- 
ity. In any case Christ stands in no integral 
relation to the Christian faith, That his name 
has become the symbol of the highest religious 
truth is accidental. It has no adequate ground in 
historic reality. Faith might as well have 
“pitched” on some other man as its ideal. In 
any event Jesus is not essential to Christianity, 
and it is not a matter of vital importance whether 
he ever lived or not. This position, as we have 
seen, Troeltsch emphatically repudiates. Chris- 
tianity for him is founded on historic fact. He 
sees in Jesus “the highest revelation of God ac- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 241 


cessible to us.”*! But how is this fact to be 
accounted for? Troeltsch’s theory makes it clear 
that the “fact” of Christ is essential to the Chris- 
tian faith, but leaves the fact itself a mystery. 
What he, therefore, really does is simply to push 
the christological problem one step further back. 
He does, however, tie up Christianity indissolubly 
with historical reality. And he also holds that 
historical reality is something that must be deter- 
mined by scientific means. “Faith,” he says, 
“can interpret facts but not establish them.’’%? 
Christianity is, therefore, necessarily dependent 
to some extent upon the results of historical re- 
search. It cannot dispense with historical facts 
without destroying itself; and it cannot by any 
subjective process of its own guarantee them 
without encroaching upon the rights of science. 
Both history and historical science have thus an 
important bearing on the Christian faith. But 
this, he holds, need cause no uneasiness, for the 
historical facts essential to Christianity are so few 
and general in character that there is no prob- 
ability that scientific research will ever disprove 
them. 

We now pass to a third point of difference 
between the new and the old rationalism. The 
new rationalism differs from the old, as we have 


"Die Bedeutung, etc., p. 50. 
"[bid., p. 33. 


242) \\) PRESENT ST ENDENCIESSIN 


shown at some length, in its conception of the 
-nature of religion and also to some extent in its 
attitude toward history. But the most character- 
istic difference between them is found in 
Troeltsch’s doctrine of a religious a priori.°* ‘This 
doctrine has its roots in Kant and Schleiermacher, 
but it was Troeltsch who first clearly formulated 
and developed it. Religious apriorism sustains 
about the same relation to the older rationalism 
as Kant’s theory of the categories did to the 
earlier doctrine of innate ideas. According to 
Kant there are no innate ideas in the proper sense 
of the term, but there are immanent principles in 
the mind that condition experience and determine 
its form. The raw material or content of expe- 
rience is derived from the sensibility, but it would 
be without form and void were it not for the 
creative activity of thought. It is the categories 
of thought that alone make experience possible, 
and these categories are structural in human 
reason. It is so also, according to Kant, with the 
moral nature. It, too, has its a priori, its cate- 
gorical imperative. Without this immanent prin- 
ciple moral experience would be impossible. Now, 
what Troeltsch did was to extend the idea of a 
rational a priori to the religious nature. Schleier- 

“See my article on “Religious Apriorism” in Studies 
in Philosophy and Theology, edited by E. C. Wilm, 
PP. 93-127. 


RELIGIOUS "\LHOUGET 243 


macher had insisted on the uniqueness and inde- 
pendence of religion. Religion is not a form of 
knowing or of doing. It is a peculiar form of 
feeling, the feeling of absolute dependence, and 
has its own distinctive nature. But Schleier- 
macher was too intent on differentiating religion 
from philosophy and morality to deem it fitting 
to apply to man’s need of God the same term 
that was applied by Kant to the fundamental and 
characteristic elements in man’s intellectual and 
ethical nature. So he did not speak of a religious 
a priori, though the idea was implicit in his sys- 
tem. With him religion was primarily a unique 
experience, to be distinguished from the rational 
nature rather than identified with it. And this 
tendency was developed still further by Ritschl 
and his followers into an almost complete an- 
tithesis between religious and theoretical knowl- 
edge. By way of reaction, consequently, against 
this dualism Troeltsch sought to bring back 
religion into the circle of reason, and so began to 
speak of a “rational a priori of religion.” 

The religious a priori, as Troeltsch conceived it, 
has two outstanding characteristics. It is purely 
“formal” and is entirely unique. The former 
idea comes from Kant, the latter from Schleier- 
macher. As a formal principle the religious a 
priori has no existence apart from experience and 
history. It cannot, therefore, furnish a basis for 


or elpreat oe 


244° PRESENT) PENDENGIESGN 


an independent religion of reason as did the 
“speculative” and “regressive” rationalisms of 
the past. “These forms of rationalism offered 
themselves, their logically deduced ideas of God 
and immortality, as substitutes for the historical - 
religions. But this is excluded by “formal” ra-_ 
tionalism. Such a rationalism points out that 
there is a rational principle immanent in the com-_ 
mon religious experience of men. “Being re-— 
ligious,” as Troeltsch says, “belongs to the a- 
priori of reason.’’?* Indeed, the a-priori element 
in religion manifests itself only in religious expe-— 
rience and religious history. What the theory of — 
a religious a priori, therefore, does, is to justify, — 
not an abstract religion of reason, but actual his-_ 
toric religion. . 
Then, too, the religious a priori is “unique.” 
It is not to be confused with the theoretical, the 
moral, or the esthetic a priori. It has its own) 
“completely anti-intellectualistic peculiarity.” This 
fact is emphasized so strongly by Troeltsch that 
one might almost as well speak of his “irrational-_ 
ism” as his rationalism. The difficulty with this 
stress on the uniqueness of the religious a priori 
is that it leaves the conception vague and unde- 
fined. It becomes about equivalent to what we 
mean by religious instinct or impulse or by faith. 
The moment we seek to define it more precisely 


“Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie, p. 44. | 


. 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 248 


we almost inevitably fall into an intellectualistic 
view of religion. H. Sueskind, for instance, says 
that the religious a priori means that it can be 
demonstrated “that it is necessary to think the 
thought of God, and that, therefore, a necessary 
idea of reason lies at the basis of religion; and 
this proof,’ he adds, “it must, of course, be pos- 
sible to carry through with cogent reasons, if the 
thought of the religious a priori is to have a 
meaning.”®® In this conception of the religious 
a priori we manifestly have a reversion, though 
unintended, to the older intellectualistic type of 
rationalism. The same is still more clearly the 
case with Bousset, who denies that the religious 
a priori is distinct from the theoretical, and insists 
that the fundamental religious ideas are a “neces- 
sary constituent of one homogeneous reason.’’ 
Troeltsch must, then, be credited with true and 
profound insight when he left the nature of the 
religious a priori indeterminate, contenting him- 
self with affirming at once its anti-intellectualistic 
peculiarity and its validity. 

The greatest philosophical foe of religion in. 
our day is relativism. All human ideas, we are 
told, are in flux; there is nothing fixed or final. 
This is especially true of religious ideas. Re- 
ligion is not a positive evil, but it is an illusion, 
a transient phase of human history. It will even- 
"Theologische Rundschau, 1914, p. 57. 


246.\ PRESENT: TENDENCIES IN 


tually either disappear or lose the distinctive 
character it has had in the past. Such is the 
common view in antireligious circles. As against 
it it is clearly a matter of prime importance to 
insist on the fundamental trustworthiness of 
reason, and particularly on the view that religion 
is rooted in reason. It has its own a priori. It 
has, therefore, nothing to fear from relativistic 
empiricism, and also nothing to fear from the 
theoretical reason. For it is itself a constituent 
and permanent factor in that deeper reason which 
underlies and expresses itself in the intellectual, 
the moral, the esthetic, and also the religious 
nature of man. These different aspects of human 
nature stand in their own right. They are 
“autonomous validities,” religion as much so as 
any of the others. Whether the term “religious 
a priori” is the best to express this idea may be 
open to question. Some think it too intellectual- 
istic in its implications, and as untrue to the real 
genius of religion in that it points to a human 
capacity rather than to a human need. They 
consequently view with not a little concern the 
degreé of interest awakened by it. Professor 
E. W. Mayer, for instance, a Ritschlian, writing 
in 1912,°° represents the theological youth of Ger- 
many as carried away with the new rationalism. 
He sees them going forth in long processions with 


“Zeitschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche, pp. 598. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 247 


poles and torches in search of the religious a 
priori, and as he watches them he feels like a 
father who beholds his sons forsaking the fruitful 
daily task and starting out on a vain quest after 
some magical stone of wisdom. 

But whatever perils there may be in the idea of 
a religious a priori, the term expresses a truth 
of fundamental significance for our day. _It 
brings out the fact that religion is permanently 
grounded in the deeps of the human reason, that 
it has its own autonomous validity, and that it 
can never be displaced. No one in the past gen- 
eration has brought out this truth more im- 
pressively or with more massive learning than 
Ernst Troeltsch. Baron Friedrich von Higel, 
the Roman Catholic scholar, speaks of “the bewil- 
deringly rich instructiveness, indeed the grandly 
tonic ethical and spiritual training power, of 
Troeltsch” ;37 and in another connection he says: 
“Even simply as utterances of one who, amidst 
the amazing distractions of our times, steadily per- 
ceives and proclaims the abiding preeminence of 
religion, Troeltsch’s writings stand among the 
most impressive, because the most circumspect and 
veracious testimonies to the indestructible need 
and conviction that the human mind and con- 
science still at bottom can find rest alone in God, 


"Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Reli- 
gion, p. 145. 


248 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


its home.”*® Writing shortly after the death of 
Troeltsch, Baron von Hiigel said of him that 
“he was great if ever man was great.’’8° 


In the religious apriorism of Troeltsch we have 
a justification of religion from the standpoint of 
reason. The method of justification is analogous 
to that from the standpoint of experience. The 
modern mind, having rejected the principle of 
authority, appealed to experience as the test of 
truth, and summoned religion before its bar. 
To some it seemed as though this prejudged the 
case, for religion by its very nature appears to 
be superempirical. But on inspection it turned 
out that experience is an elastic term. There is 
such a thing as religious experience as well as 
sense experience; and if the latter is self-verify- 
ing, there is no reason why the former should 
not be. Hence religion has appealed to the mys- 
tical and pragmatic aspects of religious expe- 
rience and has found in them a triumphant justi- 
fication of its own claim. It is so likewise with 
reason. ‘The modern mind has appealed to it 
also as a test of truth, and has summoned religion 
before its bar. Again to many this has seemed 
to prejudge the case against religion, for religion 

“Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, 


p. 194. 
“The Times (London), March 29, 1923, p. 216, 





RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 249 


appears by its very nature to be superrational. 
But on further study it turns out that reason, like 
experience, is an elastic term. There is not only 
a logical or theoretical reason, but there is also a 
moral reason, an zsthetic reason, and a religious 
reason; in other words, there is a reason that 
embraces all the structural interests of the human 
mind. Each one of these interests has its own 
rational a priori. Each one has its own inde- 
pendent ground in reason. Religion, therefore, 
has nothing to fear from reason. It carries its 
rationality in itself. There is no external ra- 
tional standard by which it can be judged. It 1s 
itself an expression of reason; and hence the 
modern appeal to reason as well as that to expe- 
rience turns out triumphantly in favor of religion. 

But reason and experience are not to be 
thought of as two distinct entities. They are, 
rather, correlative terms. One implies the other. 
Experience without reason would be formless; 
and reason without experience would be content- 
less. Experience presupposes reason, and reason 
expresses itself in experience. This is as true 
in religion as elsewhere, and is implied in the 
doctrine of a religious a priori. There is no 
religion of reason apart from experience. The 
only true religion of reason is that which springs 
up spontaneously in experience and _ history. 
These spontaneous religious growths need guid- 


250 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ance and correction, but they have their own cor- 
rective principles within themselves. Reason is 
immanent in them. Between reason and our his- 
toric faith there is therefore no necessary con- 
flict. Rather may we say with the poet, 


“. . . the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by the reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it.” 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 251 


CHAPTER V 


THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND ITS 
THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 


EXPERIENCE, reason, utility—these are the 
great tests of truth in the modern world. The 
first two are recognized by theoretical science, 
though only when understood in a restricted 
sense; the third is implicit in the socio-economic 
interest and in the belief in progress, though also 
only in a limited sense of the term. The appeal 
both to experience and to reason, as we have 
seen, has been used to undermine religious belief. 
But religion has met these attacks by so enlarg- 
ing the meaning of experience and reason as to 
find in them a basis for religious belief. Expe- 
rience in its broader meaning includes religion, 
and so justifies it. Reason likewise in its broader 
sense numbers among its a-priori principles a re- 
ligious a priori and thus guarantees the autono- 
mous validity of religion. But how about utility? 
In the general sense of value it has already been 
embraced under experience. It is the pragmatic 
or valuational aspect of religious experience that 
is the chief pillar of empirical apologetics. Re- 


252 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ligion is true because it works, because it is useful. 
The utilitarian test of truth is thus one that 
religion welcomes rather than the aS “Prag- 
matism,” as George Tyrrell says, “is an easy and 
illuminative philosophy, particularly pliable to the 
needs of the apologist... . In making Life the 
criterion of truth, in subjecting the Law of Be- 
lief to the Law of Prayer it is evidently at one 
with the teaching of Jesus. This creates an 
almost violent prepossession in its favor on the 
part of the apologist.” The extreme to which 
an apologist may go in employing it is illustrated 
by Chatterton-Hill. “Every religious system,” 
he says, “that survives is adapted to the neces- 
sities of the society in which it survives. Such a 
religious system is therefore true in the only 
sense in which truth can be proved—in the sense 
that it responds to the-end in view of which it 
was evolved. Truth is necessarily a relative con- 
ception; and the truth of a religious system can 
be judged of only with reference to a given en- 
vironment. In this environment the system is 
true (or untrue), and its truth (or untruth) can 
be proved by the concrete results of its influence 
on social life. Christianity is true for the Western 
world; Islam, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confu- 
Clanism are true in their respective environments, 
Fach responds to the needs of heterogeneous social 


‘Through Scylla and Charybdis, p. 192. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 253 


ageregates.”? Such an apologetic use, however, 
as this of the utilitarian principle is manifestly 
self-destructive. It denies outright the absolute- 
ness of Christianity, and condemns in advance all 
foreign missions. Nevertheless, it shows how 
it is possible even from the relativistic standpoint 
to use the pragmatic test of truth in such a way 
as to confirm the practical validity of religion. 
But the general appeal made by religion to 
utility does not directly meet the situation created 
by the modern socio-economic interest and the 
modern belief in social progress. Indeed, the 
particular argument used by Chatterton-Hill is 
conceived in the interest of conservatism and re- 
action rather than of social progress. “Religion,” 
he says, “is the instrument whereby the sacrifice 
of individual interests to social needs is obtained. 
... Religion is a social creation, created by society 
with a view to safeguarding its own interests 
as against the individual. . . . The aim of Chris- 
tianity is primarily to dominate and to subdue the 
individual and only secondarily to reward and 
console him. . . . We see in Christianity pre- 
eminently an organ of social defense, an instru- 
ment of social integration, and only secondarily 
a factor of individual evolution. . . . The essence 
of Christianity, which consists in the subordina- 
tion of the individual to society, is of an anti- 


*The Sociological Value of Christianity, p. xiv. 


254° PRESENT TENDENCIES UIN 


humanitarian nature. Humanitarianism is a 
doctrine that takes account only of the individual. 

. In the great conflict of the near future 
between Western civilization and socialism it will 
be found that the surest instrument of social 
defense, the most efficient of social forces, is 
Christianity.”* With such a conception of re- 
ligion as this it is evident that almost any form 
of social injustice could be defended. According 
to it no individual and no class has any rights 
as over against society as a whole; and the func- 
tion of religion is to protect society against claims 
to such rights. This social doctrine, it is true, 
might be and has been used as a ground for dis- 
possessing the propertied classes; but such action 
has seldom been taken under religious sanction. 
What Chatterton-Hill manifestly has in mind is 
a defense of the status quo and an enlistment of 
religion in the interest of the existing social order. 
Indeed, the very rationale of religion, as he con- 
ceives it, consists in its value as a conservative 
sociological force. 

It is not, then, surprising that social radicals 
like Karl Marx have evolved the theory that social 
inequality and injustice are the source and ground 
of religion. If the main function of religion is 
to subordinate the individual to society by mak- 


‘The Sociological Value of Christianity, pp. 14, 40, 
186, 165, 174, 282. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 255 


ing him willing to bear the ills of the present 
because of the hope of a future life, it is evident 
that if these ills were removed there would no 
longer be any need of religion. Whether these 
ills can be removed may be open to question. But 
Marx thinks they can be, and the idea of indefinite 
social progress seems to imply it. The chief ills 
of life, we are told, are due to defects in the 
present organization of society. These defects 
can be corrected ; equality can be established; class 
distinctions can be abolished. And when this is 
done most of the suffering of the present will 
disappear. Men will find their satisfaction in 
this life. There will be no need of the belief in 
a life to come. Such a belief exists only in “a 
state of society that requires an illusion.” It is 
economic inequality and the resulting evils that 
give rise to religion. When these evils are re- 
moved, religion will have lost its raison Wétre 
and will inevitably vanish. It has no intrinsic 
« worth; it represents no permanent need of the 
human spirit. Yet it is not necessarily to be 
regarded as a positive evil. It is a symptom of 
social disease rather than its cause. “If religion,” 
says Marx, “exists, it is in consequence of a 
defective social organization whose cause must 
be looked for in the very essence of the state 
itself... . For us religion is no longer the cause 
of social imperfection but its effect.” The logical 


256 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


attitude, therefore, of the Marxian socialist 
toward religion would seem to be that of com- 
plete indifference. 

But in actual life religion is not such a neg- 
ligible factor as the doctrinaire Marxian assumes. 
It is linked up with the present social order and 
is a powerful support of it. Hence in practice 
Marxian socialism, instead of adopting an indif- 
ferent attitude toward religion, has, as a rule, 
been actively hostile to it. William Liebknecht, 
for instance, said, “It is our duty as socialists 
to root out the faith in God with all our zeal, nor 
is One worthy of the name who does not con- 
secrate himself to the spread of atheism.” Re- 
ligion, we are told, is “the opiate of the people.” 
It is an instrument of oppression. Preachers are 
simply “the chloroforming agents of the confis- 
cating classes.” They are the hirelings of the 
moneyed interests, and consciously or uncon- 
sciously are using their influence to keep the 
people in subjection. They administer to them a 
kind of spiritual anodyne that prevents them 
from rising in their revolutionary wrath against 
their oppressors. So no matter what the Marxian 
theorist may say, the militant Marxian sees in 
religion a positive evil, a foe to progress, and a 
menace to the welfare of society. 

If in defense of the social utility of religion 
stress is laid on the moral inspiration that it brings 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 257 


to men and on the regenerating influence that it 
exercises in their lives, the Marxian socialist is 
still unmoved. For to him morality as well as re- 
ligion is a tool of oppression. The existing moral 
code, he holds, was created by the ruling classes 
in their own interest. Its laws relative to property 
and to human conduct in general were designed 
with a view to maintaining the status quo. The 
masses are indoctrinated with the idea of the 
sanctity of these moral rules and hence are kept 
in subjection. The fact, consequently, that re- 
ligion is a source of moral inspiration by no 
means commends it to the consistent Marxian 
socialist. Rather is this an added indictment 
against religion, that it quickens the conscience 
and so enslaves men all the more completely to 
the evil social conditions reflected in the moral 
code. Both ethical idealism and religion are the 
products of a defective state of society and are 
means consciously or unconsciously used to per- 
petuate such a state. In and of themselves they 
are effects rather than causes. They are like the 
cloud above Niagara Falls, which is beautiful to 
gaze upon when shot through with the golden 
rays of the setting sun, but impotent, generating 
no electricity, turning no wheels, simply the 
powerless concomitant of the mighty dashing 
waters beneath. So likewise it is the great eco- 
nomic struggle going on between the different 


258) | PRESENT PE NDENCID Sai 


classes of society that creates the cloudy dreams 
of idealism and of religion. These dreams have 
no substantiality of their own, they embody no 
objective reality; but insofar as they cast a halo 
of sanctity over the existing social order and 
hypnotize men into perpetuating it, they become 
a source of evil. And such, according to Marxian 
doctrine, has been and is the actual function of 
religion and of ethical idealism in human history. 
They support the status quo, and by that very fact 
are condemned. The Marxian standard of util- 
ity finds no place for them. This is, of course, 
an extreme view, but it represents a powerful cur- 
rent of thought in our own day. 

Another method of applying the standard of 
social utility to religion is that represented by 
Emile Durkheim, the distinguished French soci- 
ologist. Durkheim agrees with Marx in making 
religion a purely social creation. It is the struc- 
ture of society or, rather, the needs created by it 
that give rise to religion. But he differs from 
Marx in that he holds that the origin of religion 
is to be found not in a defective and transient 
state of society but in its essential and perma- 
nent structure. Marx looked forward to the 
time when there would be no religion. The re- 
organization of society would render it unneces- 
sary. Men in a communistic state would lay it 
aside as naturally as one does an outworn gar- 


a ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 269 


ment. But Durkheim sees in religion a social 
necessity. The very nature of society requires 
it. No change in social organization will ever 
enable men to dispense with religion. Religion 
is “‘an essential and permanent aspect of human- 
ity.’ For it grows out of or, rather, is involved 
in, the human faculty of idealizing; and this 
faculty “is not a sort of luxury which a man 
could get along without, but a condition of his 
very existence. He could not be a social being— 
that is to say, he could not be a man—if he had 
not acquired it.” The very texture of society 
implies it. “A society can neither create itself 
nor recreate itself without at the same time cre- 
ating an ideal. This creation is not a sort of 
work of supererogation for it, by which it would 
complete itself, being already formed; it is the 
act by which it is periodically made and remade.”4— 
This, however, does not mean that the ideal 
created by society and embodied in religious 
faith represents an independent and objective 
reality. “The reality which religious thought 
expresses is society” ;> or, as E. S. Ames puts it, 
“The reality which the idea of God expresses 
may be thought of, not as an independent person 
or individual in the very form or shape of man, 


“Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Reli- 
gious Life, pp. 21, 423, 422. 
*Tbid., p. 431. 


260 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


- but as the Common Will idealized and magnified 
in personal symbolism.”® There is then no tran- 
scendent Deity. The supernatural objects of faith 
are mythical. The thought side of religion is 
invalid. “The real function of religion is not to 
make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to 
add to the conceptions which we owe to science 
others of another origin and another character, 
but rather it is to make us act, to aid us to live.” 
Theology is therefore no essential part of religion. 
Religious thought will ultimately succumb to 
scientific thought. But this does not mean that 
religion is false. “It is,’ says Durkheim, “an 
essential postulate of sociology that a human in- 
stitution cannot rest upon an error and a lie, 
without which it could not exist. ... In reality 
there are no religions which are false. All are 
true in their fashion; all answer, though in dif- 
ferent ways, to the given conditions of human 
existence.” In other words, the social utility of 
religion constitutes its truth. There is no such 
thing as absolute religious truth. Religious be- 
liefs are constantly changing. “There are no 
gospels which are immortal, but neither is there 
any reason for believing that humanity 1s incap- 
able of inventing new ones.” New deities will 
arise in the course of time, but what their nature 
will be we do not yet know. “The old gods are 
*The Journal of Religion, 1921, p. 465. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 261 


growing old or already dead, and others are not 
yet born.’’* 

This theory emphatically asserts the social util- 
ity of religion but denies its objective validity, 
or, rather, it interprets its objective validity in 
terms of social utility, which amounts practically 
to the same thing. A religion that is valid only 
in the sense that it is socially useful is not valid 
in the objective sense of the term. A purely 
utilitarian truth is no truth, and a purely utili- 
tarian religion is no religion. The idealizing proc- 
ess that lies at the basis of religion derives all 
its vitality and power from the implicit faith that 
it is apprehending an order of objective reality. 
Apart from this faith it would itself disintegrate ; 
and this would mean the end of religion and of 
its social utility, for the social utility of religion 
depends upon and consists in its idealism. The 
objective validity of religion cannot, therefore, be 
detached from its social utility. The two stand 
or fall together. It cannot be permanently main- 
tained that religion meets the test of utility but 
fails to meet the test of experience and of reason. 
Religion cannot be regarded as a subjective illu- 
~ sion and yet continue to be a social force. If, 
then, religion is, as Durkheim asserts, a social 
necessity, the average mind is almost certain to 


"Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Reli- 
gious Life, pp. 416, 2, 3, 428, 427. 


262° PRESENT TENDENCIES UN 


take another step and conclude that it is objec- 
tively valid. It was this step that Chatterton- 
Hill took. He finds in the social utility of religion 
a basis not only for the truth of religion but also 
for both theological and social conservatism. 
There is yet another way in which the standard 
of social utility is applied to religion. This is rep- 
resented by T. N. Carver, the Harvard economist. 
Professor Carver is not particularly concerned 
with the question of the objective validity of re- 
ligion. He himself accepts the theistic idea though 
apparently in a pantheistic sense. For him the 
laws of nature are the laws of God and the only 
laws of God ascertainable by man. He says “that 
the only real school of theology is a school where 
the uniformities of the divine order are studied 
by the methods of science,” and ‘‘that the only 
person who is entitled to a hearing on any funda- 
mental question of ‘theology is the scientist.” 
There is no ideal realm of values, no moral law 
superior to the law of nature. ‘Morality is 
merely social hygiene. . . . Anything is moral 
which works well for society in the long run, and 
anything is immoral which works badly for soci- 
ety in the long run... . Whatever the order of the 
universe is, that 7s the moral order.” The real 
is the truth that God has made, it is the only true 
revelation of him; the ideal is misleading, it is 
the truth that men make. For our knowledge of 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 263 


God and the divine will we must, therefore, turn 
exclusively to nature and to the laws that promote 
the welfare of society in the “physical and prac- 
tical sense” of the term. But in spite of this 
negative attitude toward religious belief in its 
traditional form Professor Carver is deeply in- 
terested in religion as a vital social force. He 
recognizes the fact that it has in the past been a 
great generator of social energy, and apparently 
sees no reason why it should not continue to be 
such in the future. But he holds that it is a matter 
of vital significance to religion that its energy 
should be directed in the most productive way 
possible. “That,” he says, “is the most produc- 
tive expenditure of energy which supports the 
most life and supports it most abundantly, which 
gives the largest control over the forces of nature 
and the most complete dominion over the world, 
and which enables men to control whatever en- 
vironment happens to surround them and to live 
comfortably in it.”® If the Christian religion 
promotes or can be made to promote productivity 
of this kind more effectively than irreligion or 
than any other religion, its triumph is assured. 
But if it fails to do so, it has no claim upon the 
future. Its fate will inevitably be determined by 
the degree of its social and economic utility. 

In elaborating this thesis Professor Carver dis- 


‘The Religion Worth Having, pp. 871. 84, 13. 


264 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


tinguishes in his homely but trenchant style be- 
tween the “pig-trough”’ and the “work-bench”’ 
philosophy of life. The former he finds illus- 
trated in the impractical mysticism and emotional- 
ism that has characterized much of the religion of 
the past and in the hedonistic view of life that 
underlies much of current socialism. According 
to this philosophy enjoyment is the end of life. 
Opposed to this view stands the work-bench 
philosophy which lays its stress on productive 
achievement. Not pleasure but power is its ideal. 
This standpoint is illustrated in the modern bour- 
geois or capitalistic order of society with its free 
competition and its belief in the survival of the 
fittest. The struggle for existence, according to 
Carver, is a condition from which we cannot 
escape. The only question is as to how it is to 
be carried on, whether by war or by politics or 
by economic competition. The last is the high- 
est form of the struggle, for it promotes produc- 
tion. It is the type of struggle that is represented 
by the modern industrial world. Fundamen- 
tally and in principle, consequently, the present 
economic order is sound; and the hope of religion 
lies in accepting it and heartily preaching the 
gospel that underlies it. The church needs to 
learn that Jesus was “a hard-headed Galilean 
carpenter,” that “the kingdom of God is a king- 
dom of productive power at work,’ and that 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 265 


“righteousness and productiveness are synony- 
mous.” When this type of preaching is adopted 
by the church its success and that of its members 
is certain. “‘It is no accident,” says Carver, “that 
every Protestant country has outstripped every 
Catholic country, just as every Catholic country 
has outstripped every pagan country. Nor is it 
any accident that in Protestant countries religious 
people, especially those of the stricter sort, have, 
as a rule, outstripped the irreligious people... . 
The stricter discipline in essentials, and the less 
strict insistence upon nonessentials, which char- 
acterize the leading Protestant churches, have re- 
sulted in greater economy of energy and more 
productive lives among Protestants than among 
Catholics, and among religious than among irre- 
ligious people.’’? 

We need not, then, necessarily be disturbed over 
the existence of rich men’s churches and over the 
separation of the churches from the masses. This 
separation is what we would naturally expect as 
the result of the operation of economic law. The 
church people are more ethical, more productive, 
and hence more prosperous. For a religious 
organization “not to become a rich man’s church 
in this sense is a disgrace and an evidence of 
failure to perform its mission.”?° In the present 
close connection between the church and the busi- 


The Religion Worth Having, p. 96. “Ibid., p. 114. 


260 (| PRESENT TENDENC@IES#IN 


ness and professional classes there is, therefore, 
no particular ground for concern. Rather is it 
an evidence that the church has in a measure at 
least been preaching the gospel of productive 
work. Insofar as it continues to do this, its 
future is assured. For in the long run the work- 
bench philosophy is certain to triumph over the 
pig-trough philosophy, whether the latter take the 
cruder form of irreligion or the more sublimated 
form of transcendental ethics. 


We thus see that the test of social utility has 
been applied to religion in several different ways 
and with varying results. Marx regarded re- 
ligion as a pure illusion without any function in 
a properly organized society. Durkheim looked 
upon religion as a social necessity but reduced it 
to a social passion, a subjective ethical idealism, 
without any real object of faith beyond society 
itself. Carver sees in religion the possibility of 


great social and economic utility, but apparently 


interprets its fundamental ideas in a pantheistic 
and this-worldly sense. Chatterton-Hill finds in 
the sociological value of Christianity a justifica- 
tion for the belief in its traditional creed. These 
four types are not exhaustive, but they suffice as 
illustrations of the different ways in which re- 
ligion fares when it is brought before the bar of 
social utility. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 267 


The divergent conclusions reached are due pri- 
marily to differences in philosophy, but they are 
also due in part to different conceptions of soci- 
ety and of social utility. Marx thought that the 
chief need of existing society was revolution, and 
his idea of the new social order was that of a 
“pleasure economy” in which no serious sacri- 
fice would be required of the individual. This 
“hedonistic utopia” is, as C. A. Ellwood says, a 
“chimera,” but it still has considerable vogue in 
vulgar socialism. It implies that religion in the 
future will be wholly unnecessary, and that since 
religion is, as a rule, opposed to revolution, it is 
at present an evil. Chatterton-Hill regards the 
submission of the individual to the authority of 
the group as the fundamental need of society, 
Carver finds it in productive work, and Durk- 
heim apparently in the devotion of the individual 
to the common good. These three views, how- 
ever, amount to about the same thing. They 
imply that society will always require of the indi- 
vidual a discipline and sacrifice, which can be 
adequately met only by religion, no matter how 
much the individual may himself profit from the 
work or discipline to which he subjects himself. 
“The nature of our social life,” says C. A. EII- 
wood, “is such that if progress is to continue, 
it demands constantly the service and sacrifice of 
individuals for the good of humanity. ... A re- 


268 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


ligionless world would be a social world of uncer- 
tainties, destitute of enthusiasm and of vision, 
reduced to the dead level of expediency. It would 
be a social ‘world in which neither harmony nor 
good will would long prevail.”14 Religion is 
therefore necessary as a social cement. 

But how does religion serve this function? 
How does it supply the individual with the incen- 
tive to service and sacrifice? The traditional 
answer is plain. It does so by inculcating faith 
in a personal God and in personal immortality. 
But is this faith essential to religion? Durkheim 
answers in the negative, and so also apparently 
Carver. From their standpoint religion is prac- 
tically identical with social service, with humani- 
tarianism of one kind or another. ‘This is at 
present a common view. The religion of human- 
ism, we are told, is slowly but steadily displacing 
the religion of theism. The religion of the future 
will have no God except Humanity or Nature. 
But such a religion will be no religion. The fatal 
defect in all this-world religions is that they try 
to get the fruits of religion without religion. 
They are therefore condemned in advance to de- 
feat. Religion as a social dynamic implies the 
supernatural. There is no real religion that does 
not in its faith transcend both nature and human- 


“The Reconstruction of Religion, pp. 38, 60. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 269 


ity. “The more-than-human values of religion’’!? 
are the distinctive and essential part of religion. 
It is, then, idle to attempt to conserve the social 
utility of religion while sacrificing its super- 
natural implications. Without the latter the for- 
mer would vanish. If religion really has a high 
degree of social utility, if it is a social necessity, 
the probability is that its supernatural claims will 
succeed in maintaining themselyes. On this main 
point Chatterton-Hill is right. 

But the whole attempt to judge religion solely 
or chiefly by its social utility is a mistake. It 
subjects religion to an external test, and the result 
is either its rejection (Marx) or its perversion 
(Durkheim and Carver) or a rather frail de- 
fense (Chatterton-Hill). The situation in this re- 
spect with reference to utility is about the same 
as that with reference to experience and reason 
as tests of religious truth. Sense experience and 
the purely logical reason furnish no adequate 
basis for religious belief; they, rather, negate it. 
So also social utility in what would commonly be 
understood by “the physical and practical sense” 
of the term cannot go far in the way of substan- 
tiating religious faith, though it may lend it some 
support. But both “experience” and “reason” 


%See the able and instructive article on this subject 
by E. S. Brightman in the Journal of Religion, 1921, 


pp. 362-377. 


270) PRESENT TENDENGIE Sai 


may, as we have seen, be lifted to the plane of 
religion or incorporated in it and thus become its 
effective supports. They cease then, however, to 
be merely external props, and become aspects of 
the self-verifying power of faith. Experience in 
its religious form carries with it its own inner 
conviction, as truly as does sense experience; and 
the religious a priori is as structural in human 
reason as are the logical categories of thought. 
In a similar way “utility” also may be lifted to 
the religious plane. It may be made to embrace 
the inner and distinctive satisfactions of religion; 
and in this broader sense it ceases to be an ex- 
ternal standard to which religion must submit and 
_ becomes an inner standard by which religion 
judges itself. In other words, religion has its own 
intrinsic worth. It is a constituent element in 
social welfare and not merely a means to an end. 
The question of its utility is, therefore, largely 
dependent upon itself. Religion is a factor in the 
conception of utility quite as much as utility is a 
factor in the conception of religion. Whether 
religion is worth having depends quite as much 
and more on what religion itself is than upon any 
ulterior ends it may serve. As a living fellow- 
ship with the Infinite, as a vital force in human 
life, as a source of hope, courage, and loyalty, it 
brings with it its own reward, its own utility. 
Religion thus meets the modern utilitarian test 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 271 


of truth in the same way that it meets the expe- 
riential and rational tests. It enlarges the con- 
cept of utility so as to include religious values 
and so finds its justification in its own inherent 
worth, as well as in the immediacy of its own 
experience and in the validity of its own im- 
manent reason. In this way religion by virtue of 
its own native vitality gathers up into itself all 
the evidential force to be derived from the author- 
ity accorded in modern times to experience, rea- 
son, and utility. 


But while the ultimate test of religion is to be 
found in its own intrinsic value, the question of 
its own general social utility is still one of great 
practical significance. Religion does not live unto 
itself. It is organically related to life as a whole, 
and must, if it is to maintain itself, play its part 
in the world. It must, to some extent at least, 
justify itself to the world as well as to itself. 
Religious experience may be self-verifying, but 
this does not make religious beliefs wholly inde- 
pendent of the empirical sciences. The religious 
a priori may have its own autonomous validity, 
but this does not render religion completely in- 
different to the claims of the common reason. 
And so religion may have its own intrinsic worth, 
but this does not entirely exempt it from the neces- 
sity of meeting the test of general soctal utility. 


272) PRESENT) TENDENCGIES@EN 


Religion must have its modus vivendi with soci- 
ology and socialism as well as with natural science 
and philosophy. Indeed, the claims of the former 
are at present far more urgent than those of the 
latter. People to-day are much more interested in 
the social utility of religion than in its abstract 
truth. For them “the real problem,” as Bishop 
McConnell says, “is not as to whether Christianity 
is absolute or not, but as to whether it is adequate 
or not.’”'* Is Christianity able to meet the de- 
mands of the present ‘social situation? This 
question is not identical with that relative to the 
ultimate truth of Christianity, but it has an im- 
portant bearing upon it; and for practical religion 
it is a question of decisive significance. 

In dealing with this question it is necessary, 
first of all, to form as clear a conception as pos- 
sible of the main elements in the social problem 
of our day. This problem is one of such vast com- 
plexity that only some of its more significant 
aspects can here be brought out. 

Basal to the whole problem is the belief in 
social progress, and not only in social progress 
but in the plasticity of society. The belief in social 
progress is, as we pointed out in the first chap- 
ter, one of the great characteristic ideas of the 
modern world. It stands opposed to the ancient 
heathen belief in a series of world-cycles and to 


“Public Opinion and Theology, p. 249. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 272 


the apocalyptic hope of the Jews. It is more akin 
to the latter than the former. The belief in world- 
cycles excludes the idea of progress. Each cycle 
is a repetition of the preceding one. There is no 
goal toward which the universe is tending, no 
real development. So far as the present cycle is 
concerned, mankind is now involved in a process 
of “inevitable degeneration and decay—inevitable 
because it was prescribed by the nature of the uni- 
verse.” 14 “Time,” as Horace says, “depreciates 
the value of the world.” As contrasted with this 
belief the apocalyptic hope of the Jews looked 
forward to a new and eternal world-order in 
which their ethical ideals would be realized. It 
thus implied the idea both of cosmic development 
and of human progress. But it was a develop- 
ment or progress initiated and carried through 
entirely by divine agency. The idea of progress 
as a law inherent in the nature of things or as a 
result effected by human endeavor is a modern 
conception. It is also one of great dynamic power. 
It releases the ideal forces of human nature from 
their bondage to fate and makes them at least 
potentially a powerful factor in shaping the 
future of society. 

One may, it is true, conceive of progress itself 
as a fate, a natural necessity. But this is a super- 
stition whose logical consequences for human con- 


SPB. Bury, The Idea of Progress, p- 9. 


274 PRESENT. TENDENCIES IN 


duct are seldom drawn. The freedom of man is 
generally assumed, and the certainty of progress 
based on natural law, like that based on divine 
predestination, only nerves the will to greater 
effort. One has the feeling under such circum- 
stances that in the struggle for social progress one 
has the support either of nature or of Providence. 
In any case, since the French Revolution and the 
industrial revolution in England there has been a 
growing conviction that the social order is not 
an external fatality, that it is plastic to human 
touch, that man has made it, and having made it 
is able to unmake it. It is this conviction that 
forms the presupposition of the social problem in 
its present concrete form. 

Another characteristic of present-day thought 
on the social question is the tendency to subordi- 
nate the individual to society. Society, we are 
told, is the reality; the individual is but an ab- 
straction from it. He has no independent worth 
and no independent destiny. His whole being is 
determined by the group or class to which he 
belongs or by his social environment. This ten- 
dency in modern thought is being carried to an 
almost absurd extreme. Not only is all morality 
said to be social. But “logic,” as Professor Fite 
says, “tells the same story. For truth is also 
social; it turns out to be nothing but the opinion 
of the race as against that of the individual... . 


— 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 275 


Likewise for psychology mental development is 
social. . . . Child psychology, so called, fairly 
wallows in the social, and condemns the poor 
child to an exclusively social life. I have some- 
where,” continues Professor Fite, “seen a peda- 

gical treatise in which the child rose in the 
morning, donned his social vestments, ate his 
social breakfast, and went about his social occu- 
pations, indulging later in the day in some social 
recreation and some further social refection— 
after which, I should say, it remained only to 
put on his social nightgown and tuck him into his 
social bed.’?® But absurd as are some of the 
expressions of the socializing tendency in modern 
thought, it is still true that the serious discussion 
of the social problem in our day is dominated by 
the idea of social solidarity. It is through legis- 
lation, through group action, that the ills of 
human life are to be removed. The appeal to the 
individual as such is of little avail. This is the 
standpoint represented both by socialism and the 
science of sociology. 

A third important aspect of the modern social 
problem is the prominence assigned to the eco- 
nomic factor. With many the social question is 
primarily and almost exclusively an economic 
question. So much so is this the case that I have 
designated the social interest of our day as the 


“Individualism, p. 4. 


276) PRESENT TENDENGIE Sin 


“socio-economic”? interest. It is the economic 
question that gives color and direction to the 
whole social problem. If the bread-and-butter 
question could be settled, there would be no 
further difficulty in the relation of men to each 
other. “I reckon,” says a social radical in some- 
what crude terms, “that when the wardrobe is 
full, and grub adorns the shelves, that salvation 
will be plenty and souls will save themselves.” 
It is this doctrine that underlies Marxian so- 
cialism. According to Marx it is the economic 
environment, the methods of production and dis- 
tribution, that determine man’s consciousness 
tather than the reverse; or, as Feuerbach puts it, 
‘“‘a man is what he eats.” 

A fourth characteristic of the modern social 
situation is the revolt of the proletariat and its 
struggle for supremacy, or at least for economic 
equality. The industrial revolution gave rise to 
a new social class and a new social consciousness, 
that of the propertyless wage-earners. It greatly 
augmented their numbers, and led to their or- 
ganization as a distinct and militant group. It is 
the struggle of this group for better social and 
economic conditions that has riveted the atten- 
tion of the world upon the social problem. The 
struggle is a class and a mass movement, and has 
_ about it the intensity and immediacy or irra- 
tionality of such movements. But back of it there 


i i 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 277 


is a revolutionary philosophy that aims at the 
overthrow not only of the existing economic sys- 
tem but of those cultural ideals embodied in the 
traditional morality and religion. The movement 
has therefore been one away from the church and 
from religion. 

The counterpart of the proletarian movement 
and its chief inciting cause is to be found in 
capitalism, which may be considered the fifth im- 
portant factor in the modern social problem. It 
is not easy to give a precise and adequate defini- 
tion of capitalism, but its main features may be 
briefly enumerated. It is individualistic; it im- 
plies free competition; it stimulates unduly the 
acquisitive instinct; it encourages production, at 
times overproduction or wasteful production; it 
favors the concentration of capital in the hands 
of the few. The last feature is the one that has 
been chiefly responsible for the proletarian or 
socialistic revolt. Whether it is a necessary part 
of the capitalistic system, is open to question. The 
unequal distribution of wealth might conceivably 
be corrected in large measure by heavy inhert- 
tance-taxes, by the fixing of monopoly prices, by 
the appropriation of large unearned increments 
on land values, and by the restriction of immigra- 
tion. But as the system actually has worked, it | 
has tended in the direction of great inequality, 
an inequality that is incapable of ethical justifi- 


278 PRESENT: TENDENCIESAN 


cation and that inevitably leads to protest and 
social unrest. 

In production and distribution there are two 
ideals. One is dominated by the law of mercy, 
the other by the law of justice. One says, “From; 
each according to his capacity, to each according 
to his needs’; the other says, “From each accord- 
ing to his capacity, to each according to his 
deeds.” To neither of these ideals is the existing 
system attuned. In principle it accepts the law of 
justice, but in practice it often departs glaringly 
from it. The law of mercy it hardly recognizes 
at all, except as it is forced to do so. It has not 
yet learned the lesson of “Live and let live.’ No 
doubt it has its own great merits.. It allows free- 
dom, it encourages individual initiative and en- 
terprise, it stimulates productive work. It is, 
indeed, the only system that has solved the prob- 
lem of production. But, on the other hand, it 
_ has its great evils. It is hard and relentless in 
spirit, it subordinates the man to the machine, it 
engenders strife, and is more concerned about 
power and victory than about peace and well- 
being. These evils grow necessarily out of a sys- 
tem of unrestrained freedom of competition, and 
their existence imperatively demands that the 
system be modified by being brought into subjec- 
tion to the law both of humanity and justice. 

Akin to capitalism is nationalism, which is the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 279 


last element in the modern social problem that I 
shall mention. What capitalism is within the 
national group, that is nationalism in the world 
asa whole. The two are theoretically independent 
of each other. It is quite conceivable that a state 
organized on a communistic basis might be as 
nationalistic as our present capitalistic states. 
There is nothing in universal communism that 
necessarily would put an end to war. National 
rivalries would probably flare up under such a 
system as readily as under existing conditions. 
Nevertheless, modern nationalism and modern 
capitalism have grown up together, and there is 
a certain kinship of spirit between them. Both 
stand for the ideal of power, both generate strife, 
and both are quite content that one group should ) 
prosper at the expense of others. Neither, how- 
ever, is an unmixed evil. Both have their roots 
deep in human nature. Capitalism grows out of 
the acquisitive instinct, without which no high 
degree of civilization would be attainable. Na- 
tionalism has a more complex source. The idea 
of nationality is not easily analyzed, but that the 
national spirit is a natural growth and not an 
artificial creation can hardly be questioned. 
Lessing a century and a half ago said, “I have 
no conception of the love of country ; and it seems 
to me at best a heroic feeling, which I.am quite 
content to be without.” But to-day such a con- 


280 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


fession would be generally regarded as an indica- 
tion of an abnormal state of mind. Since Les- 
sing’s time there has been a remarkable develop- 
ment of the national spirit, and this development, 
it is felt, must have some valid basis. Exactly 
what constitutes a nation is not perfectly clear. 
A nation is not a race, not a territory, not a lan- 
guage, not a history, not even a state. It is 
something different from any and all of these, and 
yet to some extent implies them all. “It is chiefly 
tribal feeling,” says Bertrand Russell, “that gen- 
erates the unity of a national state, but it is not 
only tribal feeling that generates its strength. 
Its strength results principally from two fears, 
neither of which is unreasonable: the fear of 
crime and anarchy within, and the fear of ag- 
gression from without. . . . In addition to these 
two, there is a third source of strength in a na- 
tional state, namely, patriotism in its religious 
aspect, ...an element of worship, of willing sac- 
rifice, of joyful merging of the individual life in 
the life of the nation. This religious element in 
patriotism is essefitial to the strength of the state, 
since it enlists the best that is in most men on the 
side of national sacrifice.”1® Nationalism has 
thus both a natural basis and an ethical justifica- 
tion. Nevertheless, in an intensified and un- 


“Principles of Social Reconstruction, pp. 54, 55, 
56. 


—- 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 281 


moralized form it is a breeder of war and perhaps 
the greatest menace to the welfare of mankind. 
Such, then, are the main factors that enter into 
the present social situation and that give rise to 
the social problem: the belief in social progress, 
the subordination of the individual to the group, 
the prominence of the economic element, socialism 
or the proletarian revolt, capitalism and national- 
ism. All of these factors agree in concentrating 
attention (1) upon this world, (2) upon external 
conditions, and (3) upon human power. The 
power may be conceived as primarily individual 
in one case, as primarily social in another, and 
as primarily national in yet another; but in each 
case it is human power on which reliance is placed 
for man’s redemption. And this power is re- 
garded as manifesting itself in the control of 
external conditions. Some may think that the 
best way to effect this control is through the in- 
creased production of material goods, and others 
may think that the best way is through a reor- 
ganization of human society that will bring about 
a more equal distribution of these goods. But in 
either case it is the external environment that 
alone is considered significant. The program in 
both instances is a this-worldly program. Man’s 
weal or woe is regarded as determined by his 
present outward conditions. It is the nature out- 
side of man rather than that inside of him that 


282.) ) PRESENT TEN DENG TSUN: 


needs to be conquered. And this conquest is 
possible only through human wisdom and might. 
It is the kingdom of man, not the kingdom of 
God, that is to be established in the world. 

Such is the ideal generated by the modern 
socio-economic interest and by the belief in social 
progress, and such is the ideal that underlies both 
socialism and capitalism and also modern national- 
ism. Pleasure, power, pride—these are its hall- 
marks. And in view of the intensified form in 
which they appear in the titanic industrialism, the 
militant socialism, and the aggressive and exag- 
gerated nationalism of our day, it is not strange 
that the Christian spirit does not feel at home in 
the modern world. “The whole religious life,” 
as Troeltsch says, “is itself in a serious crisis.’’*" 
‘It finds itself in a society dominated by a spirit 
and ideal hostile to itself. That quiet and peace, 
that inner triumph over the world, that sense of 
sacred fellowship with God and man, that out- 
look into the eternal—these spiritual values, in 
which the religious life finds its chief good, are to 
a large extent negated by the world about us. 


In view of the foregoing facts it is not surpris- 
ing that modern religion has much of it with- 
drawn into itself. It has retired into a cloistered 
subjectivity, contenting itself with cultivating its 


“Die Sozialphilosophie des Christentums, p. 31. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 283 


own mystic states and the inner life of the soul. 
Or it has raised a vain protest against the modern 
belief in social progress, has sought to revive ob- 
solete modes of thought, and has thus condemned 
itself to intellectual provincialism. But neither 
of these attitudes can the militant church adopt. 
It must play its parts in the world of to-day, it 
must form some sort of working alliance with 
modern thought, and seek to bring modern eco- 
nomic and political life into greater conformity 
with its own ideals. The church did this in the 
ancient and medizval world, and what it then did 
it must do to-day. Just as the early and medieval 
church worked out a Christian social philosophy 
by the fusion of its own religious teaching with 
the Stoic doctrine of a natural moral law, so the 
modern church must take the more congenial ele- 
ments in the social thought of to-day and by trans- 
forming them make them the basis of a new 
Christian philosophy of society. This is an obli- 
gation that the church cannot and dare not shirk. 
Its own continued efficiency in the world is de- 
pendent to a large extent upon the contribution 
it makes to the solution of the social problem. It 
is this fact that has given rise to the social gospel. 
The social gospel is the response of the church to 
modern social theory and practice. 

This response has taken two distinct though re- 
lated forms. The first is more general and less 


284 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


radical than the second. It marks a break with 
traditional theology and traditional ecclesiastical 


practice rather than with traditional social theory. ‘ 


It aims at social reform rather than social revo- 
lution; it attacks concrete evils rather than the 
system as a whole; its method is retail rather than 
wholesale. But it is nevertheless thoroughly mod- 
ern in its standpoint. Its modernity manifests 
itself in three main respects: in its acceptance of 
the belief in social progress, in its stress on social 
solidarity, and in its recognition of the importance 
of material well-being. It thus stands opposed 
to the millenarian eschatology, the individualism, 
and the asceticism of the past. It falls in line 
with the modern tendency to transfer interest 
from heaven to earth, from the individual to 
society, and from subjective spirituality to objec- 
tive efficiency. This does not mean that the social 
gospel rejects the belief in heaven, or that it dis- 
countenances the evangelistic appeal to the indi- 
vidual, or that it denies value to the cultivation 
of personal piety. But it does mean that the 
social gospel subordinates these tendencies in the 
religious thought and life of the past to the great 
social task that confronts humanity here and now. 
“Its interests,” as Rauschenbusch says, “lie on 
earth, within the social relations of the life that 
now is.”18 This standpoint also means that re- 


“A Theology for the Social Gospel, Dp. 3p 


os 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 28s 


ligion represents no isolated interest, but that it 
has a significance for all of life, the economic, 
the political, and social as well as the distinctively 
spiritual and ethical. Or, rather, it means that 
true and wholesome spirituality and morality can- 
not remain cooped up in a narrow individualism 
and a barren subjectivity. They must seek the 
light and the freedom of a redeemed social order. 

The anti-eschatological, anti-individualistic and 
anti-ascetic tendencies of the social gospel—or, 
from the positive point of view, its this-worldly 
tendencies—have already to a considerable degree 
been incorporated into the thought and practice 
of the church. The premillenarian movement, it 
it true, is still active and represents a reactionary 
force that needs still to be reckoned with. But 
in the programs and policies of the leading 
Protestant denominations the tendency manifestly 
is to adopt the standpoint represented by the social 
gospel. This appears clearly in the change that 
has taken place in our conception of foreign mis- 


sions. ‘To-day,’ as Gerald Birney Smith says, / 
“the missionary enterprise is being shifted from | 
a program of rescuing a few souls from eternal 


disaster to the ideal of a long campaign of educa- 


tion and social reconstruction in the non-Christian | 
nations.”?2 Indeed, the shift has already to a 


Social Idealism and the Changing Theology, p. 
110. 


286 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


large extent been made. Our slogan no longer 


is “the evangelization of the world in this genera- — 


tion,’ but, rather, “the Christianization of the 
world even if it takes fifty generations.” Our look 
into the future has been enormously extended. 
We are thinking of centuries and even millen- 
niums to come. And the task has been propor- 
tionately enlarged. It has to do not simply with 
the conversion of individuals and the establish- 
ment of a church, but with the transformation of 
heathen society and the establishment of Chris- 
tian ideals in the entire life of the people. This 
altered plan and outlook has naturally brought 
about a corresponding change in missionary 
method. Stress is now laid not simply on per- 
sonal evangelism, but on education, on hospital 
work, and on the improvement of social and eco- 
nomic conditions in general. These lines of ac- 
tivity, it is true, are treated as means to an end, 
but they are indispensable means, and this makes 
them an essential part of the missionary program. 
The ultimate aim may no doubt remain the same, 
but it is humanized and socialized in such a way 
as to be practically a new objective. 

The influence of the social gospel is also seen 
in the institutional and community churches that 
are being established, in the new program that is 
being worked out for the rural church, and in the 
recreational activities connected with the churches 


a a ee 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 287 


in general. In these new developments it is im- 
plied that the mission of the church is broader 
than has previously been recognized. It takes in 
the whole man. The older negative and ascetic 
attitude toward life is being given up. Life asa 
whole in all its normal unfolding is coming to be 


regarded as sacred. What religion, consequently, , 


should aim at is the promotion of the general well- 
being of mankind... And this aim it can realize 
only in conjunction with the agencies that modern 
science puts at our disposal. There is no magical 
religious process by which health can be restored 
and maintained. Mere praying will not save a 


community from an epidemic or guarantee to it ~ 
material prosperity. The community must avail - 


itself of all the knowledge that can be gained 


from medical and economic science. Nor can re- . 


ligion fulfill its special mission of character-build- 
ing apart from the social and psychological condi- 
tions under which individuals live. In spite of 
all that the prophet Ezekiel says of the absolute 
independence of the moral personality of the in- 
dividual, and in spite of the fact that in the 
abstract and ideal his teaching is sound, it is still 
true that in the world as we know it the individual 
does live under the ban of his own past and also 
under that of an evil heredity and an evil environ- 
ment. Ina world of heredity and social solidar- 
ity it is impossible that the ideal of complete moral 


288 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


independence on the part of the individual should 
be realized. No doctrine of supernatural con- 
version can blind us to this fact. The moral and 
spiritual redemption of men is dependent upon 
certain favoring social and psychological condi- 
tions. It is therefore the duty of the church not 
only to determine by scientific study what these 
conditions are but to do everything in its power 
to promote their establishment in the life of the 
community. It is this fact that gives historic sig- 
nificance to the social gospel. ‘The social gospel,” 
as Rauschenbusch says, “registers the fact that 
for the first time in history the spirit of Chris- 
tianity has had a chance to form a working part- 
/ nership with real social and psychological sci- 
Pence, 2 

But while the social gospel in its more general 
form carries with it an important change of em- 
phasis, it does not mark so fundamental and 
decisive a break with the past as is sometimes 
supposed. It is no doubt true that men to-day 
protest against and seek to correct certain evils 
to which previously they patiently submitted. It 
is also true that there was at first more or less 
of ignorant opposition on the part of Christian 
people to new discoveries and inventions that 
sought to relieve pain, to prevent disease, and 
even to save men from death. For instance, “‘to 


*A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 5. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 289 


alleviate the sufferings of childbirth by the use 
of anesthetics was for a time vigorously de- 
nounced as a sacrilegious scheme to remove the 
providentially appointed consequences of Eve’s 
share in the primal sin of mankind.”*_ Likewise 
when vaccination against smallpox was first in- 
troduced, it was condemned on the ground that 
it contravened the divine will. When a man gets 
smallpox, it was said, it is the divine will that he 
should have it. So also when the lightning-rod 
was invented, it was objected that it too was an 
attempt to thwart the divine purpose; for when 
a man was struck by lightning it was God’s will 
that this should occur. But it could hardly be 
seriously maintained that this was ever the con- 
sidered judgment of the Christian world. Not 
only does it imply a fatalism inconsistent with 
Christian teaching, but it contradicts the funda- 
mental Christian law of love which instinctively 
seeks to save life and to relieve pain and suffering. 
It may, I think, be safely stated that there never 
was a time in the history of the church when 
Christian people freely submitted to what they 
believed to be preventable evils. However de- 
bauched they may at times have been by theo- 
logical speculation, they never went so far as this. 


"Gerald Birney Smith, Social Idealism and the 
Changing Theology, p. 118. 


2900). PRESENIVTENDENCIES MN 


The impulse to life inherent in the Christian faith 
would not have permitted it. 

That we have succeeded in preventing some 
diseases and removing some evils that to earlier 
generations seemed unavoidable, is a cause for 
devout gratitude. It also justifies the hope that 
in the future much of the suffering of the present 
will be rendered unnecessary by human skill and 
the advancement of knowledge. But this hardly 
warrants the conclusion that the religious attitude 
toward the evils of life has changed from one of 
submission to one of protest. In the past, it is 
said, “the evils of this life were believed to have 
been ordained of God for some mysterious pur- 
pose of discipline.’ Hence “the moral duty of 
the Christian was to submit rather than protest.” 
To-day, however, “the presence of evil arouses 
our protest.”?% This statement is no doubt true 
insofar as it applies to the attitude of society as 
a whole toward certain preventable diseases. But 
it certainly does not express the attitude of the 
individual Christian who is suffering from some 
serious disease. He employs every remedy at his 
command, just as sensible Christians in all ages 
have done, but through it all his attitude is still 
one of submission, not protest. Surely, the evils 
of life have not lost their providential and dis- 


“Gerald Birney Smith, Social Idealism and the 
Changing Theology, pp. 117, 120. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 291 


ciplinary significance for the Christian of to-day. 
Whether preventable or not, they have their mean- 
ing for religious faith and always will have. 

Then, too, we need to remind ourselves that the 
greatest evils of life, those that are bound up 
most closely with religion, lie beyond human con- 
trol. Ultimate physical decay and death await us 
all. To protest against them would be as rational 
as to protest against thunderstorms, cyclones, and 
earthquakes. These facts are, to be sure, quite 
unideal, but they are facts nevertheless, and the 
only sane and religious thing to do is to submit to 
them. Nothing that the modern man has discov- 
ered or invented, releases us from this duty and 
necessity. There is at present danger of our 
grossly exaggerating the spiritual significance of 
the scientific control of nature. When we take 
the long look, this control does not, after all, get 
us very far. The proper attitude for us to assume 
toward life as a whole and toward the universe 
remains substantially the same as with our fore- 
fathers; it is that of submission rather than pro- 
test. Still, this need not dampen our enthusiasm 
for the social gospel and its new conception of 
Christian duty and opportunity for service. 
Rather does the long look of submissive faith give 
added incentive to social endeavor. 

Thus far we have considered simply one aspect 
or form of the social gospel, a type of it which 


292))| | PRESENT TENDENCIES 


is gradually making its way into the church and 
is coming to be generally accepted. This form of 
the social gospel is largely practical in character, 
devoting itself to the righting of specific wrongs 


and the general improvement of material and , 


social conditions without raising the political 
question connected with the economic system as 
a whole. As between capitalism and socialism 
its attitude might be said to be neutral. It stresses 
the things on which both agree. But there 1s 
another and more radical type of the social gos- 
pel which centers attention on the economic sys- 
tem as such, and takes the side of socialism 
against capitalism. It contends that the present 
capitalistic system with its free competition is 
unchristian; it arrays individual against individ- 
ual, class against class, nation against nation. So 
long as it continues, it will inevitably lead to strife 
and war. Particular reforms here and there can 
at the best be only palliatives. Not until the entire 
system is changed and a socialistic state of society 
is introduced can there be peace and concord. 


The consistent application of the gospel, therefore, _ 


to the present economic system means a revolu- 
tion. Such is the contention of the more radical 
representatives of the social gospel. They also 
hold that only such an interpretation of Chris- 
tianity will succeed in winning back to the church 
the multitudes who have left its fold under the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 293 


influence of socialistic propaganda. Only as the 
church adopts their ideal of economic equality 
and cooperates with them in the effort to bring 
in a new social order, will it be possible to bridge 
over the chasm that now separates the church and 
the proletariat. The future of the church, con- 
sequently, as well as the welfare of society de- 
pends on its adoption of the socialistic standpoint. 

This radical form of the social gospel, which 
might more exactly be called Christian socialism, 
serves at least one important function. It tends 
to pry the church loose from its present close 
connection with the capitalistic order. This con- 
nection is particularly close in the case of the 
Protestant Church, especially’ ‘its Calvinistic 
branch.22 ‘‘After all is said and done,” says 
Troeltsch, “Calvinism remains the real nursing- | 
father of the civic industrial capitalism of the | 
middle classes. Self-devotion to work and gain, — 
which constitutes the involuntary and unconscious 
ascetism of the modern man, is the child of a 
conscious intramundane asceticism of work and 
calling inspired by religious motives.”** The re- 
lation, then, between modern Christianity and the 
established order is not external and accidental. 
It is not simply the conservative tendency in re- 
ligion—its tendency to be a social cement rather 


2See Max Weber, Religionssoziologie, i, pp. 17-206. 
*Protestantism and Progress, pp. 135f. 


204). \ PRESENT DE NDENGIBES EIN 


than a social ferment—that leads it to indorse 
the existing system. There is a causal relation 
between them, a kinship of spirit. The capitalis- 
tic doctrine of work and struggle has its source 
and inspiration in the Protestant form of Chris- 
tian asceticism. Hence it is only natural that the 
Christian churches, particularly in Protestant 
lands, should have a special interest in the main- 
tenance of the present economic system, that they 
themselves should be largely controlled by the 
business and professional classes who profit most 
from existing conditions, that as a result they 
should be more or less blind to prevailing social 
evils, and: that they should look with positive dis- 
approval upon the effort to introduce a new social 
order, especially as the advocates of the latter 
have most of them in the past been openly hostile 
to religion. But natural as all this is, it involves a 
serious peril both to religion and to society. It 
tends to identify religion with the interests of the 
privileged classes, it tends to perpetuate grave 
evils in the social order, it tends to raise a barrier 
between the church and the toilers. Insofar, 
therefore, as the social gospel tends to break the 
strangle-hold that social and economic conserv- 
atism now has on the church by allying itself with 
the socialistic program, it renders an important 
service to the cause of religion. It lifts Chris- 
tianity above the strife of economic systems and 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 295 


makes it the critic of all such systems rather than 
the partisan of any one. It thus leaves the church 
free to line up with any program or movement 
that gives promise of promoting true social prog- 
ress, and by so doing destroys the middle wall of 
partition between organized religion and organ- 
ized labor. 

But while the social gospel in its radical form 
is having this wholesome effect, it is itself advo- 
cating a policy that would commit the church to 
an alliance that might be even more perilous than 
the present one. Rauschenbusch, for instance, 
tells us that ‘God must join the social movement. 

_ If we trust the Bible, God is against capital- 
ism, its methods, spirit and results. The bour- 
geors theologians have misrepresented our revo- 
lutionary God.’”’?5 These words have a partisan 
ring. They seem to aim at enlisting religion in 
the cause of a political and economic movement 
which may or may not be for the best interests of 
mankind. No doubt the socialistic ideal of equal- 
ity has in it Christian elements, but so also has the 
ideal of liberty that underlies modern capitalism. 
The latter ideal evoked quite as much enthusiasm 
a little over a century ago as the former ideal does 
to-day. Both are one-sided, and neither is likely 
to be realized. Thus far the equalitarianism of 
socialism has been about as spiritually ineffective 


*4 Theology for the Social Gospel, pp. 178, 184. 


296 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


as the libertarianism of capitalism. Both have 
produced bitterness and strife rather than the 
spirit of fraternity. Christianity should not, 
therefore, ally itself with either but be the critic 
of both. 

This, however, is often overlooked by minds 
of the prophetic type. They see only the evil in 
the old and only the good in the new, and so 
become ardent advocates of the latter. Such 
people need to be reminded of three significant 
facts in connection with the social problem, The 
first is its enormous, yea bewildering complexity. 
Ludwig Stein begins his great work on The Social 
Question in the Light of Philosophy by quoting 
a saying of Heinrich v. Sybel to the effect that 
“a fruitful treatment of the social question is pos- 
sible only to him who recognizes, to begin with, 
the insolubility of the problem.” No single for- 
mula will ever enable a man to master the prob- 
lem, much less to solve it. Anyone who pro- 
fesses to have a solution of the problem by that 
very fact proves his incapacity to deal with it. 
The social question is an ever-recurring one in 
human life, varying in character from age to age. 
Solved in one form it recurs in another. So far 
as Our Own generation is concerned, its great task 
is to curb unbridled individual and national free- 
dom and create a general plan for economic co- 
operation among the nations of the world. But 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 207 


this is manifestly something that cannot be done 
merely by good will or by means of religious 
ideas. It is, as Troeltsch says, “at once a sci- 
entific and a practical-political problem that only 
the highest form of technical knowledge and a 
transcendent type of statesmanship can solve.’’?® 

Christian prophets of the new social order need 
also to be reminded that there is no distinctive 
Christian social theory, that is, no social theory 
that springs directly out of the religious idea ex- 
pressed in Christianity. Such a theory is not to 
be found in the teaching of Jesus. We do find 
there the idea of the kingdom of God. But the 
kingdom of God, as he conceived it, was apocalyp- 
tic and eschatological in character. It was not a 
Social theory for intra-mundane relations, and it 
did not become such even later when it came to be 
identified with the church. There did, it 1s true, 
gradually grow up within the church a Christian 
social philosophy—and Christianity is the only 
religion that has such a philosophy—but it was 
not a strictly native growth. It was based on 
the Greco-Roman doctrine of a natural moral 
law. This law served the same purpose in Chris- 
tian ethics that the idea of the Logos did in Chris- 
tian theology. It was the connecting link between 
Christian and secular thought. The Christian so- 
cial philosophy built up on this basis was domi- 

"Die Sozialphilosophie des Christentums, p. 32. 


298) PRESENT TENDENCIESSIN 


nant during the medieval period and is still not 
without considerable influence. A variant type 
grew up later under Calvinistic influence in lands 
where there Was a felt need of adjusting Christian 
social teaching to the separation of church and 
state and to modern democracy and capitalism. 
But this type has never attained the consistency 
that the medizval type did. 

More recently by way of reaction against the 
evils of capitalism there has arisen the tendency 
to identify Christian social teaching with social- 
ism. It is this tendency that is represented by the 
more radical advocates of the social gospel. What 
they are contending for has a certain justifica- 
tion in present conditions, and undoubtedly has 
some value in the way of bringing about: a 
rapprochement between the church and the dis- 
affected working classes. “But,” as Troeltsch 
says, “the transformation of labor-socialism into 
Christian socialism and the new world redemption 
and erection of the kingdom of God resulting 
from this is a monstrous dilettante idea, in com- 
parison with which the old Christian law of 
nature is a paragon of wisdom.’’2* All that can 
be said for it is that there has always been a 
tendency toward social radicalism in the Christian 
Church. This is illustrated by the communistic 
experiment in the church at Jerusalem, by the 


“Die Sozialphilosophie des Christentums, p. 32. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 299 


monastic movement, by the peasant revolt in Ger- 
many in the early years of the Reformation, and 
by the communistic theories frequently expressed 
by Christian theologians. Christian ‘socialism 
may, therefore, justly claim that it is not an exotic 
in the church, not a modern innovation, no matter 
how unjustified its identification of Christianity 
with socialism may be. 

A third fact that some of our social radicals 
might do well to take note of is that the existence 
of a social ideal does not necessarily guarantee 
the possibility of its realization under mundane 
conditions. “A universe,” we are told, “that! 
necessitates the permanently deficient is one that 
we refuse to accept. Mankind will challenge it 
or die rebelling against it... . Humanity will not 
be denied the realization of its passion for the 
ideal. As it has refused to be thwarted by the 
physical universe, so will it decline to be defeated 
by the supposedly unconquerable defects of its 
common nature.”’28 These are brave words, and 
as against a rigid economic rationalism and a 
cynical social and political conservatism they are 
as wholesome as they are stirring. But if taken 
as the calm expression of a social theory and a 
social hope they have no foundation either in 
science or religious faith. There is no reason for. 
believing that the social ideal will ever be realized 


17 F, Ward, The New Social Order, p. 351. 


300° “PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


on earth. Christian ideas and forces will work 
powerfully in that direction, but, to quote the 
impressive words of Troeltsch, “as little as any 
other power in this our world will they create the 
kingdom of God on earth, as a completed social 
ethical organism; every idea will still be met by 
brutal facts, every upward development by in- 
terior and exterior checks. There exists no abso- 
lute Christian Ethic, still awaiting its first dis- 
covery; but only an overcoming of the changing 
situations of the world, as also the earlier Chris- 
tian Ethic was not an absolute Christian Ethic, 
but only such an overcoming, in its way. There 
exists also no absolute ethical transformation of 
material nature or of human nature, but only 
a wrestling with them both. Only doctrinaire 
idealists or religious fanatics can fail to recognize 
these facts. Faith is indeed the very sinews of 
the battle of life, but life does in very deed 
remain a battle ever renewed along ever new 
fronts. For every threatening abyss that is closed 
a new one yawns before us. The old truth re- 
mains true: the Kingdom of God is within us.’’29 

But in spite of the dilettantism and economic 
irrationalism, into which some advocates of the 
social gospel fall, they represent a sincere and 
earnest effort to apply in a thoroughgoing way 

“Die Soziallehren, pp. 985 £.; quoted by Von Hiigel, 
Essays and Addresses, pp. 193f. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 301 


the prophetic-Christian teaching to modern social 
problems. Indeed, the social gospel in its essen- 
tial nature is simply a specification under the 
prophetic moralization of religion. It seeks to 
save religion from its innate tendency toward a 
useless ceremonialism and a barren subjectivity, 
and make it a vital force in the social redemption 
of mankind. It takes the Christian ideas of serv- 
ice, sacrifice, and brotherhood, and urges that they 
be made controlling in the business and social 
world, putting them in the place of the pagan 
ideas of pleasure, power, and pride that are now 
dominant. The social gospel thus belongs to the 
field of Christian ethics. So far as Christian the- 
ology is concerned, it is to a certain degree neutral. 
A man might be a theological conservative and 
yet a social radical, or he might be a theological 
radical and yet a social conservative. Theology 
and social theory are to a considerable extent in- 
dependent of each other. The social gospel has 
no distinctive theology of its own, but it does 
have certain theological implications or tenden- 
cies; so that it is proper to speak of “a theology — 
for the social gospel” in the sense that one type 
of theology is more congenial to it than another. 
And since the social gospel is at bottom an attempt 
to modernize Christianity from the social point 
of view, its leanings will naturally be in the direc- 
tion of a modern theology. In this connection it 


302)" PRESENT TENDENCIES GN 


may be. noted that it was the great progressive 
theologians, Schleiermacher and Ritschl, who 
first stressed the social idea in Christianity. 

There are four aspects of the social gospel that 
have a more or less direct bearing on theology. 
These are its predominant interest in the present 
earthly life, its democratic tendency, its ethical 
emphasis, and its stress on social solidarity. We 
might consider each of these aspects and its the- 
ological implications separately, but this would 
involve not a little repetition, as the different 
aspects mentioned sustain a close relation to each 
other. It will, therefore, be better to take them 
up together and point out the bearing of the social 
gospel as a whole on the main topics in theology: 
the doctrine of God, the doctrine of sin, the doc- 
trine of redemption, and the doctrine of the future 
life. The discussion of each will necessarily be 
very brief. 

In the conception of God the social gospel 
stresses his democratic character. This is a re- 
action against the autocratic elements in the older 
doctrine of God. Under a despotic government 
it was natural to think of God as an irresponsible 
despot. He was the source of all authority, and 
hence might do as he chose with his own creatures. 
He might predestinate them to everlasting life or 
condemn them to eternal death. The decision 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 303 


lay wholly in his own hands. But such an idea 
is manifestly offensive to our modern democratic 
sense of justice. Bishop McConnell tells a story 
of a Jacksonian Democrat who in a public service 
protested against the doctrine of the divine de- 
crees, declaring that “the people would not stand 
for it.’ In earlier times this protest would have 
seemed an impertinence. The people then had no 
rights either as against God or the theologians. 
But to-day the conception of popular rights is 
penetrating theology. Arbitrary action is con- 
demned in God as well as ina human ruler. Some 
have gone so far as to object to applying the word 
“king” to the Deity, and have seriously proposed 
that instead of “the kingdom of God” we should 
speak of “the democracy of God” or “the com-, 
monwealth of God.’”’ But this impresses one as re- 
ligious pedantry. Furthermore, kingship ex- 
presses an essential idea in the thought of God. 
God is not elected by the people. He rules in his 
own right. He is the embodiment of those abso- 
lute ideals which we do not make but find, and 
to which we are in duty bound to submit whether 
we will or no. Then, too, there are inexplicable 
elements in the universe, that necessarily to us 
have the appearance of arbitrariness, and to these 
also we must bow whether we like it or not. There_ 
is, therefore, in the rule of God, a note of sover- 
eignty that transcends the democratic ideal In 


304. PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


a democracy the important thing is that the ruler 
please the people; in the divine government the 
important thing is that the people please the 
ruler. ( 

When we talk about democratizing the idea of 
God, what we usually have in mind is moralizing 
it, bringing out the thought of the divine respon- 
sibility. As Bowne used to say, God is the most 
deeply obligated Being in the universe. This is 
implied in the Christian conception of the divine 
Fatherhood, but it was overlooked by the tradi- 
tional theories of the atonement. There God was 
thought of as an autocratic Ruler whose honor 
must not be offended, or as a stern Judge whose 
primary concern was with the strict enforcement 
of the principle of retributive righteousness, or as 
a Governor whose fundamental interest lay in the 
efficiency of his administration. In all of these 
theories there is an important truth, namely this, 
that there is an ethical ideal which not even God 
dare sacrifice in order to please men. But this 
truth was crudely expressed, and the fact was 
overlooked that the ethical ideal is incomplete 
without the notion of the good will and the sense 
of responsibility to others. Justice and mercy 
are not antithetical terms. In an ancient prophecy 
we read that Jehovah is “a just God and a 
Saviour” (Isa. 45. 21). The two ideas go to- 
gether, and are combined in the thought of the 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 305 


divine Fatherhood. By virtue of his paternal 
relation to men God is under obligation to do 
everything he can to save them. It is this truth 
that is commonly associated with what is called 
the democratic idea of God. Rauschenbusch, for 
instance, says of Jesus that “when he took God 
by the hand and called him ‘our Father,’ he de- 
mocratized the idea of God. He disconnected 
the idea of the coercive and predatory state, and 
transferred it to the realm of family life, the chief 
social embodiment of solidarity and love. He not 
only saved humanity; he saved God... . The 
value of Christ’s idea of the Fatherhood of God 
is realized only by contrast to the despotic ideas 
which it opposed and was meant to displace. We 
have classified theology as Greek and Latin, as 
Catholic and Protestant. It is time to classify 
it as despotic and democratic.’’*° 

There is, however, a danger of identifying God 
too closely with the interests of humanity. The 
danger lies not only in the direction of a weak and 
immoral sentimentalism, but also in the direction 
of an extreme limitation of the divine power. 
The latter danger appears in the current idea of 
a finite God. This idea is not distinctively mod- 
ern. It is implied in polytheism, and has also 
at times been advocated by Christian thinkers. 
Marcion, for instance, in the second century dis- 

4 Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 174. 


306 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


tinguished between the Creator-God of the Old 
Testament and the good God of the New Testa- 
ment. The latter he conceived of as a moral 
power working in a world which he had not made. 
The current idea of a finite God, while akin to the 
Marcionitic teaching has, of course, no direct con- 
nection with it. It has sprung up out of the em- 
piricistic and pluralistic tendency in modern 
thought, on the one hand, and out of the modern 
recognition of the social value of religion, on the 
other. John Stuart Mill was the first to proclaim — 
the new gospel.*! It was then taken up by 
William James,? and more recently has been 
popularized by H. G. Wells in his widely read 
book God the Invisible King. 

Wells rejects the idea of God as Creator and 
as Providence, but the idea of God as Redeemer 
he enthusiastically advocates. ‘The ultimate of 
existence,” he says, “is a Veiled Being, which 
seems to know nothing of life or death or good 
or ill.’ Concerning him or it we have no real 
knowledge. The true God, on the other hand, 
the Redeemer-God, is the God of our moral and 
mystical experience. His home is “in our hearts.” 
He is a finite Being, and stands in an intimate and 
apparently dependent relation to humanity. 
“Somewhere,” we are told, “in the dawning of 


“Three Essays on Religion, pp. 242-257. 
"A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 310ff. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 307 


_ mankind he had a beginning, an awakening, and 
- as mankind grows he grows. With our eyes he 
looks out upon the universe he invades: with our 
hands he lays hands upon it. All our truth, all 
our intentions and achievements, he gathers to 
himself. He is the undying human memory, the 
increasing human will.’ Yet he is said to be a 
“person.” “He is not merely the best of all of 
us, but a Being in himself, .. . an immortal Being 
arising out of man, and external to the individual 
man.”’%% Wells’ conception of God would thus 
seem to be a cross between theism and Comte’s 
Religion of Humanity. If the existence of such 
a finite Deity were admitted, we would still need 
an absolute Being to explain his origin. And this 
absolute or Veiled Being would be the ultimate 
ground of religious faith, if such faith persisted. 
Religion as well as philosophy demands the abso- 
lute. Wells’ finite deity is a nondescript being 
whose paternity neither philosophy nor religion 
would be willing to acknowledge. To him 
Haeckel’s coarse jest about God as a “gaseous 
vertebrate’ would properly apply. The finite 
God is not built into the universe in such a way 
as to give the impression of real existence. Rather 
is the idea of such a being a curio belonging in 
the museum of religious thought. Nevertheless, 
it is interesting and significant as a speculative 


"God the Invisible King, pp. 14, 61, 85. 


308 |) PRESENG TEN DENGIE SAN 


attempt to save the social passion of religion while 
surrendering its metaphysical basis. 

In its doctrine of sim the social gospel empha- 
sizes the idea of solidarity. This idea in theology 
is a two-edged sword. In one direction it cuts 
down the Pharisaic and Pelagian claim to right- 
eousness on the part of the individual, but in the 
other direction it destroys the basis of individual 
responsibility. It is thus both a friend and. foe 
to the Christian faith. It has been such in the 
past, and it is such again in the ‘hands of the 
social gospel. In the traditional theology it took 
the form of the doctrine of original sin. This 
doctrine expresses the idea that sin is a super- 
individual reality, that it enslaves the individual, 


so that redemption from it is impossible through _ 


self-effort and can come only through divine 
grace. In this idea there is manifestly a funda- 
mental religious truth, a truth of religious expe- 
rience. Religion would be meaningless without 
it, or at least would be a very superficial factor 
in human life. But in the form in which it was 
often expressed in the past it seemed to deny 


human freedom, and hence in modern times there 


has been a tendency to reject it. Sin and guilt, 


it is pointed out, are inalienable; they cannot be — 


detached from the individual. They cannot be 
transmitted from parent to child. The idea, 
therefore, that all men are somehow responsible 


Ss SS Ul CC 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 309 


for the sin of Adam and have inherited his guilt 
must be regarded as a theological fiction. But 
while this has been the tendency in modern re- 
ligious thought, the social gospel has to some ex- 
tent run counter to it. It has laid stress on the | 


social nature of sin, its superindividual character.) ~ 


“Sin,” says Rauschenbusch, “is lodged in social 
customs and institutions and is absorbed by the 
individual from his social group.”’** This view 
differs from the traditional doctrine of original 
sin in that it makes social tradition rather than 
heredity the main channel through which sin is 
transmitted. But this is merely a difference of 
emphasis. The two views agree in making sin 
objective to the individual. There is a kingdom 
of sin as well as a kingdom of God. This idea 
was developed in a significant and fruitful way 
by Ritschl,3°> and undoubtedly expresses a fact of 
human experience, whatever ultimate explanation 
of it may be given. 

‘ Stress on the objective power of sin may have 
one or the other of two different effects. It may 
deepen or it may weaken the consciousness of sin. 
The former result occurs in the case of highly 
sensitive, idealistic and mystical natures. They 
feel themselves as individuals involved in the 
guilt of humanity. The fact that they dwell 


*4 Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 60. 
*Tustification and Reconciliation, pp. 334-350. 


310 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


among a people of unclean lips impresses them 
with a sense of their own sinfulness and help- 
lessness. But this is not the usual result of the 
solidaric conception of sin. To most people it 
affords an opportunity to unload the responsibil- 
ity for their own sins upon society. This is 
manifestly the prevailing tendency at present. 
The emphasis we are placing on social énviron- 
ment as the determining factor in human life is 
making the consciousness of sin less vivid than 
it was. The sense of guilt is less keenly felt. 
Men are not so aware of the need of repentance 
as they once were. The sinfulness of society is 
an excuse for the shortcomings of the individual 
rather than a challenge to action; and such it 
is likely to remain with most people. “What is 
everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” This 
rule applies to sin as well as to duty. That it 
ought not to be so may be freely conceded, but 
that it is so can hardly be questioned. Emphasis 
on social solidarity has weakened the popular con- 
sciousness of sin, and the current doctrine of 
economic determinism has well nigh destroyed it 
in wide circles. It is therefore an urgent religious 
need that the one-sidedness of the social gospel 
and of present social teaching be corrected at 
this point, and that the individual be reinstated in 
his central place in the moral life. For without 
the depth, the inwardness, and intensity of an 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 311 


acute sense of individual responsibility there can 
be no high development of religion. 

The doctrine of redemption is so closely related 
to the doctrine of sin that here, too, we find 
the social gospel emphasizing the idea of solidar- 
ity, though it also stresses the ethical character 
of redemption. Redemption, as it is conceived 
by the social gospel, has three distinct aspects. 
Tt means the redemption of society as well as that 
of the individual; it means that the individual 
cannot be fully redeemed apart from the redemp- 


tion of society; and it means that true redemption | 


is ethical, not mystical, in nature. The last con- 


ception is not distinctive of the social gospel. It 


is a common modern idea, and is one of the out- 
standing characteristics of the Ritschlian theology. 
The only difference between the Ritschlian stand- 
point and that of the social gospel is that the 
latter is inclined to interpret the word “ethical” 
in an exclusively “social” sense, thus depriving 
it to some extent of its inwardness and depth of 
meaning. But both agree in their antipathy to 
mysticism and in their conception of religion as 
primarily a matter of will and conduct. “Salva- 
tion,” says Rauschenbusch, “is the voluntary so- 
cializing of the soul.”°* The way to God is not 
above humanity but through it. This, in general, 
may be accepted as sound doctrine, but a one- 


*4 Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 99. 


312 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


sided stress upon it tends to destroy the warmth 
and immediacy of religious experience. Mysti- 
cism as well as humanitarianism has its place in 
religion. ~* 

More distinctive of the social gospel is its con- 
ception of redemption as applicable to society as 
well as to the individual. There are great super- 
personal forces in human society that need to be 
destroyed. There is the titanic selfishness em- 
bodied in militarism, in imperialism, and in capi- 
talism. There are numerous evil customs to 
which men are enslaved and great social and 
economic inequalities that have arisen without 
adequate justification. In the past the tendency 
was to accept these evils as unavoidable and even 
as ordained of God. In one of the church-hymns 
we have this stanza: 


“The rich man in his castle, 
The poor man at his gate, 
God made them high or lowly 
And ordered their estate.” 


But the present mood is very different. Men do~ 
not now look upon the inequalities and evils of 
the existing social order as an external fate to 
which they must submit. They regard society as 
plastic. And to this altered mood the church 
has responded with its doctrine of the redemption 
of society. Society as well as the individual can 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 313 


be saved from its sins, regenerated, and made 
anew. ‘To this task, therefore, the exigencies of 
the present situation demand that the church de- 
vote itself with all the powers at its command. 
The conversion of individuals here and there will 
not suffice. Society itself must be converted, in- 
wardly and outwardly transformed, so that it 
may bea fit home for the children of God. Noth- 
ing short of this will satisfy either the secular 
or the religious mood of our day. A purely indi- 
vidualistic gospel belongs to the past. 

It is, furthermore, an implication of the idea 
of solidarity that the redemption of the individual 
is dependent upon that of society. “If there 
cannot be an isolated personality,” says A. C. Mc- 
Giffert, “or an isolated character, there cannot be 
isolated salvation. Nobody can be saved from 
society, he must be saved with it... . To be saved 
in the full sense of the word means to be part of 
a saved race. ... Apart from such a Christianized 
society there is no real and abiding salvation for 
any man.’’** To this position there need be no 
objection from the Christian standpoint, provided 
the freedom of the individual and his independ- 
ence of external conditions are adequately pro- 
tected. But at present the tendency is to put so 
much stress upon social environment that the in- 
dividual is threatened with a-new spiritual bond- 

“The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, pp. 277f, 


Bid PRESENT TEN DENG lasein 


age. If men are so bound to the social organism 
that their only hope lies in the transformation of 
the existing social order, then is there scant 
ground for the belief in the possibility of their 
redemption. If this is all that the social gospel 
has to offer to the toiling millions, its message 
of hope will in the end prove a mockery. It is 
not in the promised transformation of outward 
conditions that the gospel message is to be found. 
Such a message may have a certain religious 
value under existing circumstances. But “it must 
be remembered,” as Harnack says, “that the chief 
task of the church is still the preaching of the 
gospel, that is to say, the message of redemption 
and of eternal life. Christianity as a religion 
would be at an end if this truth were obscured, 
and the gospel were to be changed into a social 
manifesto, whether for the sake of gaining popu- 
larity, or owing to excessive zeal for reform. 
More than that; none dare ultimately expect more 
for himself from the message of the church than 
a firm, consolatory faith, able to triumph over all 
the troubles of life.”3° It is here that we have 
the heart of the gospel. 

To the natural man it must seem that Jesus was 
guilty of an anti-climax when in his message to 
the Baptist after recounting the fact that “the 
blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the 


“The Social Gospel, p. 72, 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 315 


lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the 
dead are raised,’ he ended by saying that “the 
poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt. 
II. 5-6). What could be more worthless to the 
poor than the preaching of the gospel? What 
they manifestly need is material and physical help. 
Yet Jesus apparently cited his preaching of the 
gospel to them as the most important of his Mes- 
sianic credentials. In so doing what he meant 
to say was that, while the relief of suffering is 
important, more important is the inner power to 
triumph over the world. This power he declares 
is now, for the first time in human history, within 
the reach of the humblest classes. To them all 
life in spite of their hard lot may have a meaning 
and a value. That is the true gospel. As dis- 
tinguished from it the promise of a better social 
order no doubt serves also as a spiritual inspira- 
tion to men, but the promise is one that has never 
been realized in the way or to the extent ex- 
pected. For men, therefore, to invest all their 
hopes in the improvement of social conditions is 
to court disappointment and despair. Far more 
important is it that the conviction be created 
within them that no matter how untoward cir- 
cumstances may be, life for no one need be a 
failure. Victory over the world is possible to all 
through faith. To most men in our materialistic 
age this no doubt seems a vain dream, but even 


316 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


from their realistic standpoint it is less so than 
the utopia of socialism. 

The point at which the social Soave diverges 
most sharply from the traditional theology is 
in its attitude toward the belief in the future life. 
It does not reject this belief, but it makes nothing 
of it. It is practically indifferent to it. Its own 
interests center in this world. In taking this atti- 
tude the social gospel, it seems to me, makes an 
undue concession to positivism and to social 
radicalism. Positivism rules out the metaphysi- 
cal altogether and leaves no place for a substan- 
tial soul. With this widespread theory we dealt 
briefly in the first lecture. Social radicalism sees 
in the belief in immortality simply a device of the 
ruling classes for keeping the oppressed masses in 
subjection. Against it, consequently, the bitter- 
est scorn is vented. Even a socialist like Upton 
Sinclair, who professes to be an enthusiastic dis- 
ciple of Jesus, says, “If you can get a man to 
believing in immortality, there is no more left for 
you to desire: you can take everything he owns— 
you can skin him alive if it pleases you—and he 
will bear it with perfect good humor.’’®® He then 
adds that the man who “got up” the idea of 
immortality was a “world-genius.” In harmony 
with this is the tone and temper of the radical 


“The Profits of Religion, pp. 21096. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 317 


propaganda in general. One of the “I. W. W. 
Songs” has as its chorus these lines: 


“You will eat, by and by, 

In that glorious land above the sky; 
Work and pray, live on hay, 

You'll get pie in the sky when you die.” 


This scoffing attitude toward the belief in a future 
life on the part of social radicals no doubt has 
some justification. The belief does lend itself 
to an anti-social use, and such use has been made 
of it in the past. It is, of course, also a source 
of inspiration to social activity, but this is not so 
evident to the average mind, and even the re- 
ligious mind often fails to draw the proper social 
inference from the belief. The result is that a 
sense of discord between the impulse to social 
activity and the belief in immortality has sprung 
up in the modern world, and the tendency is to 
encourage the former at the expense of the latter. 
This tendency is reflected in the negative or at 
least passive attitude of the social gospel toward 
the Christian hope. 

But this position from the religious point of 
view is superficial and shortsighted. The re- 
ligious spirit cannot be “cribbed and cabined”’ 
within the limits of humanity’s earthly existence. 
By virtue of an inner necessity it reaches out 
toward the eternal and absolute; and from this 


aes 


e 


“" 


318 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


standpoint a positivistic world, a merely earthly 
drama, has neither worth nor meaning. This 
truth has been expressed in words of “poignant 
beauty” by A? J. Balfour. “We survey,” he says, 
“the past and see that its history is of blood and 
tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of 
» stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We 
sound the future, and learn that after a period, 
long compared with the individual life, but short 
indeed compared with the divisions of time open 
to our investigations, the energies of our system 
will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, 
and the earth tideless and inert, will no longer 
tolerate the race which has for a moment dis- 
turbed its solitude. Man will go down into the 
pit, and all his thought will perish. The uneasy 
consciousness, which in this obscure corner has 
for a brief time broken the contented silence of 
the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know 
itself no longer. Imperishable monuments and 
immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger 
than death, will be as though they had not been. 
Nor will anything that remains be better or be 
worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and 
suffering of man have striven through countless 
generations to effect.’’?° 
From such an outcome to the universe as this 
the human spirit instinctively recoils, and seeks 





“Essays and Addresses, p. 308. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 3190 


its comfort and its strength in the Christian hope. 
Nothing short of this hope will satisfy the deep- 
est needs of the human soul; and between it and 
the social hope there need be no conflict. Rather 
do they, when properly understood, support each 
other. The thought of the hereafter needs to be 
moralized, and the social hope needs to be ra- 
tionalized and Christianized. We need, as H. F. 
Ward says, “‘to tie the social program up to the 
eternities and fill it with the power of an endless 
litesi3t When this is done, it will be seen that 
Christianity instead of being the foe of progress is 
its only sure guarantee, and that the only abiding 
spring of social activity is to be found in the 
Christian hope. “The Christian Ethos,” says 
Troeltsch toward the close of his monumental 
work on “The Social Doctrines of the Christian 
Churches and Groups,” “alone places a goal be- 
fore the eyes of us all who have to live and 
struggle through our difficult social existence—a 
goal which lies beyond all the relativities of the 
earthly life, and compared with which everything 
else represents only approximate values. The 
conviction of the Divine Kingdom of the future, 
which is but faith in the final realization of the 
Absolute, in whatever way we may conceive this 
realization, does not, as short-sighted opponents 
maintain, deprive the world, and the life in the 


“Social Evangelism, p. 24. 


320 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


world of their value; but it makes the soul strong, 
throughout its various stages of progression, in 
the certainty of a last absolute meaning and aim 
for human toil. It thus raises the soul above the 
world without denying it. Only through this, 
the deepest insight of all Christian asceticism, .. . 
do all social utopias become superfluous; and the 
impossibility, always preached anew by experience, 
of a full understanding and a full execution of 
the ideal, need not then throw back the seeker 
into that skepticism which so easily springs from 
an earnest veracity; and which is everywhere in- 
vading the finer spirits of our times. The Be- 
yond is, in very truth, the power of our Now and 
Fiéere::i*4 


This concludes our survey of the main tenden- 
cies in modern religious thought. The basal prob- 
lem with which we have dealt is the one as to 
whether Christianity will be able to maintain its 
verity in the modern scientific world. This is the 
crucial question of our day. A definitive answer 
to it is impossible. But such answers as have 
been given by Christian thinkers afford good 
ground for encouragement to the religious be- 
liever. The unscientific idea of an absolute ex- 
ternal authority has been relinquished, but no 
serious loss seems as a result to have befallen 


“Pp. 478f.; quoted by von Hiigel, ibid., pp. 191f. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 321 


Christianity. Summoned before the bar of expe- 
rience, of reason and of utility, the Christian 
religion has in each case been able to give a good 
acount of itself; and it has done so without bow- 
ing the knee to any foreign master. It has 
asserted its own independence and yet has won 
the intellectual respect of fair-minded men in 
general. There. is a type of experience, a type 
of reason, and a type of utility, each of which 
would leave no place for religion. But religion 
has successfully contended that they are all im- 
perfect and undeveloped types. There is such a 
thing as a super-empirical experience, a super- 
rational reason, and a super-utilitarian utility, all 
of which are realized in religion. 

‘It is this fact that accounts for the persistence 
of religion in the modern world and that so baffles 
the unbeliever. A recent writer in the Rationalist 
Press Association annual thus expresses the difh- 
culty in which he finds himself. “The gospel 
miracles,” he says, “are the veriest ‘trifles com- 
pared with the authentic, undeniable miracle of 
Christianity’s mere existence. . . . Subjected to 
a bombardment of unexampled violence from 
every point of the material and moral universe, 
it shows never a sign of surrender... . Blown 
sky-high to-day, it presents an unbroken and smil- 
ing surface to-morrow. .. . No other religion, 
be it remembered, is subjected to anything like 


322 PRESENT TENDENCIES IN 


the same ordeal... . It is the survival of Chris- 
tianity in the realistic atmosphere of the West 
that is such an amazing and impressive phe- 
nomenon. Defenses it has none; its last bastions 
were pulverized at least a generation ago. But 
still it rears its head, serene, arrogant, undis- 
mayed. ... It is just here that we find ourselves 
face to face with the miracle. Discredited beyond 
expression—historically, intellectually, morally 
bankrupt—Christianity is nevertheless as pros- 
perous to all appearances as ever it was.’** In 
the face of this fact it would seem necessary to 
conclude either that man is a hopelessly irrational 
being or that there are depths to reason which the 
rationalist has not fathomed. The latter conclu- 
sion is the one to which post-Kantian thought has 
been steadily moving, and in the light of it Chris- 
tianity need have no fear as it contemplates the 
future. : 


“Quoted by A. C. Bouquet, Js Christianity the Final 
Religion? pp. 7. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 323 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


THe author desires to express his appreciation of 
the favors extended to him by various publishers from 
whose publications he has made brief quotations in the 
present work. In return for the privilege to reprint 
he is pleased to give deserved credit to these respective 
volumes by indicating the name of the book, author, 
and publisher in the following list, and also to record 
the number of the page in this volume on which each 
particular excerpt appears. It will be found in addition 
that in nearly every case in the text a footnote credit 
indicates the page on which the quoted sentence of 
paragraph is located in the work from which the se- 
lection is made. 

The Macmillan Company: The Rise of Modern Re- 
ligious Ideas, A. C. McGiffert; p. 313. The New So- 
cial Order, H. F. Ward; p. 299. Modern Democracies, 
James Bryce; p. 17. Foundations, Be ple etrecter ; 
p. 123. The Freedom of Authority, J. W. Sterrett ; 
p. 79. The Idea of Progress, J. B. Bury; pp. 52, 273- 
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durk- 
heim; pp. 259, 261. A Psychological Siudy of Reli- 
gion, J. H. Leuba; pp. 136, 175, 176, 179. Miscellamies, 
John Morley; pp. 21, 22, 53. History of Philosophy, 
W. Windelband; p. 96. Social Idealism and the Chang- 
ing Theology, Gerald Birney Smith; pp. 285, 288, 289, 
290. Theology as an Empirical Science, D. C. Mac- 
intosh; pp. 141, 142, 143, 145. God the Invisible King, 
H. G. Wells; pp. 77, 307, 309. 4 Theology for the 
Social Gospel, W. Rauschenbusch; pp. 284, 295, 395. 
The Reconstruction of Religion, C. A. Ellwood; pp. 10, 
Bhiv7 2. 0a0. 


324) PRESENT OT ENDENGIBS iN 


Longmans, Green & Co.: The Foundations of Belief, 
_ A. J. Balfour; pp. 80, 83, 226. History of English Ra- 
tionalism, A. W. Benn; pp. 149, 160, 184. Individual- 
ism, Warner. Fite; p. 275. Pragmatism, William 
James; p. 14. A Pluralistic Universe, William James; 
pp. 133, 306. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 
William. James; pp. 86, 181, 194. Essays in Radical 
Empirtetsm, William James; p. 135. Through Scylla 
and Charybdis, George Tyrrell; p. 252. The Present 
Conflict of Ideals, R. B. Perry; pp. 24, 37. Present 
Philosophical Tendencies, R. B. Perry, p. 55. 

Houghton Mifflin Company: Personalism, B. P. 
Bowne; p. 42. The Immanence of God, B. P. Bowne; 
pp. 50, 125, 126, 133, 134. The Religion Worth Hav- 
ing, Professor Thomas N. Carver; pp. 263, 265. 

Yale University Press: Idealism and the Modern 
Age, G. P. Adams; p. 21. 

The Century Company: Principles of Social Recon- 
struction, Bertrand Russell; p. 280. 

Harvard University Press: Strife of Systems and 
Productive Duality, W. H. Sheldon; p. 62. 

D. Appleton & Co.: A History of the Warfare of 
Science with Theology tw Christendom, Andrew D. 
White; pp. 100, Iot. 

Charles Scribner’s Sons: Faith and Its Psychology, 
W. R. Inge; pp. 183, 201. The Knowledge of God, 
Professor Henry Melville Gwatkin; p. 80. 

Doubleday, Page & Co.: Religions of Authority and 
the Religion of the Spirit, Auguste Sabatier; p. 127. 
The Christ Myth, Arthur Drews; p. 235. 

G. P. Putnam’s Sons: The Social Gospel, A. Har- 
nack and W. Herrmann; p. 314. The Communion of 
the Christian With God, Wilhelm Herrmann; p. 172. 
Protestantism and Progress, E. Troeltsch; p. 293. 


RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 325 


American Book Company: Theory of Thought and 
Knowledge, B. P. Bowne; p. 136. Theism, B. P. 
Bowne; p. 185. 

Henry Holt & Co.: Reconstruction in Philosophy, 
John Dewey; p. 21. 


INDEX 


Adams, G. P., 21, 24 

Agnosticism, 30, 35ff. 

Allegorical method, 97f., 
108f. 

Ames, E. S., 259 

Aquinas, 205 

Aristotle, 15, 31 

Astruc, Jean, 117 

Atheism, 30ff. 

Augustine, 47, 87, 100, 112 

Authority, definition of, 79f. 

Authority, kinds of, 81ff. 

Authority, reinterpreted, 
126ff. 

Autonomy, principle of, 74 

Avenarius, 38 


Balfour, A. J., 54, 80, 83, 226, 
318 

Baur, C. F., 118 

Baxter, Richard, 153 

Benn, A.W., 148, 160, 184, 198 

Biblical study, history of, 
8oft. 

Biedermann, A., 218, 228 

Bousset, W., 220, 228ff. 

Bowne, B. P., 34, 42, 50, 124, 
126, 133, 135, 185, 188, 
226, 304 

Brightman, E. 5., 269 

Brooks, Phillips, 130 

Bryce, James, 17 

Bury, J. B., 52, 273 


Cairns, John, 210, 212 
Calvin, 150 

Calvinism, 293 
Capitalism, 277f. 
Carlyle, 222 

Carver, T. N., 262ff., 269 
Certainty, religious, 85f. 


Chatterton-Hill, 149, 252ff., 
267 

Christian social philosophy, 
282, 297 

Chubb, Thomas, 224 

Coe, G. A., 180f. 

Comte, A., 33, 34, 38, 63, 66 

Copernican astronomy, 43, 


114 
Criticism, biblical, 115ff. 


Darwinism, 45 

Deism, 207ff. 

eeu and Christianity, 
22f. 

Democracy, kinds of, 2off. 

Democritus, 31 

Descartes, 74f. 

De Wette, M. L., 117 

Dewey, John, 21, 38 

Drews, Arthur, 235 

Dualism, metaphysical, 93f. 

Durkheim, E., 258ff., 266, 
269 


Economic factor, stress on, 
275. 
Fichhorn, J. G., 116, 211% 


Elert, Werner, 196, 215, 219 
Ellwood, C. A., 16, 23, 71, 


267f. 
Emerson, R. W., 82 
Empiricism, philosophical, 


g5f., 132ff., 1928. 
Empiricism, theological, 
T4A7t, LOT 
Engels, F., 64 
Erlanger school, r61ff., 224f. 
Eucken, R., 34 
Evolution, 45, 119f. 


326 


INDEX 


Experience and religion, 71, 


124f., 132ff., 186f., 194f. 


Experience and reason, 248ff. 


Faith and mysticism, 18of. 
Farrar, F. W., 99 
Faulkner, J. A., 174 
Ferri, Enrico, 32, 65 
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 
276 
Fite, Professor, 275 
Frank, H. R., 161f. 
Frazer, James, 15 
Fries, J. F., 228 
Future life, 316ff. 


Bi 225) 


God, democratic, 302f. 
God, finite, 305f. 

Gospel, social, 283ff., 300f. 
Gregory the Great, 101 
Gressmann, H., 220 
Gunkel, H., 220 

Gwatkin, Professor, 80 


Haeckel, 307 

Harnack, A., 173, 314 

Hegel, 214ff., 239 

Herbert of Cherbury, 207 

Herrmann, W., 171, 225 

History - of - religion school, 
220ff. 

Hobbes, T., 120 

Hofmann, J. C. K., 

Horace, 273 

Hume, David, 38, 
210 


161, 164 


135, 193, 


Idealism, 222f. 
Immanence of God, 121, 222. 
Individual, subordination of, 


274i. ah 

Infallibility, biblical, 9of., 
1i0ff. 

Infallibility, ecclesiastical, 
103f., 107f. 

Inge, W. R., 113, 183, 201 


Innate ideas, 202 
Inspiration, o6f. 


327 


James, William, 38, 46, 86, 
133, 135, I192f., 194, 306 
Jesus, 130, 163, 160f., 233ff. 

Justice, law of, 278 


Kaftan, J., 170 

Kant, 135, 204, 213, 214, 217, 
233, 238, 242 

Kantian epistemology, 122f., 
202f. 

Kingdom of God, 303 


Lange, A., 31, 34, 38 
Law, reign of, 47f. 
Leibnitz, 198 

Lemme, Ludwig, 205 
Lessing, 212, 279 
Leuba, J. H., 136, 175f., 


193 
Liebknecht, W., 256 
Locke, John, 123, 197 
Lombard, Peter, 43 
Lotze, H., 183 
Luther, 111, 150, 206 


179, 


Mach, Ernst, 38 

Mackintosh, D. C., 
14iff. 

ascnnete Riaz 

Marcion, 305 

Marx, Karl, 64ff., 254ff., 266, 
269 

Materialism, 30ff. 

Mayer, E. W., 246 

Mazzini, 17, 22 

Sosa | ea PA a 
272,13 

MeGiktert A. C., 313 

Mercy, law of, 278 

Mill, J. S , 306 

tigen ‘4of., 93f., 221ff. 

Morley, John, 20f., 22 

Mysticism, 143f., 170, 179 


138, 


186, 


Nationalism, 278f. 
Neo- rationalism, 190, 221ff. 
Nietzsche, F., 195 


ae, 
t 


328 


Origen, 47 

Otto, Rudolf, 221, 228, 231f. 
Outlook, religious, 71f., 320f. 
Overbeck, Franz, 58 


Paulus, H. E. G., 211 

Perry; KR: Bi) 24, 541. 

Personalism, 227 

Philo, 98 

Pietism, 152, 160, 194 

Plato, 31, 96 

Positivism, 35ff., 316ff. 

Pragmatism, 124, 251f. 

Pratt, J. B., 144, 146, 182 

Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 32 

Progress, social, 23f., 51ff., 
272ff. 

Proletariat, revolt of, 276f. 

Psychology of religion, 175ff. 


Rationalism, ethical, 203f. 

Rationalism, philosophical, 
19of., 197. 

Rationalism, theological, 203, 


207 
Rauschenbusch, W., 284, 288, 
295, 395, 309 
Rawlinson, A. E., 123 
Redemption, doctrine of, 
311ff, 
Relativism, 245f. 
Religious a priori, 242ff. 
Religious crisis, present, 7of. 
Renan, E., 15 
Ritschl, A., 165ff., 195, 204, 
221, 225, 231, 243, 302, 309 
Ritschlianism, 138ff., 173, 
2100.) .227 
Russell, Bertrand, 68, 280 


Sabatier, A., 108, 126f. 

Science, ancient and modern, 
15 

Science and religion, 27ff. 

Schleiermacher, 147, 154ff., 
187, 199, 213, 219, 221, 
221 2400202 


INDEX 


Schweitzer, A., 58 

Scotus, Duns, 206 

Sheldon, W. H., 21 

Simon, R., 116 

Sin, doctrine of, 308ff. 
Sinclair, Upton, 316 

Smith, G. B., 285, 28of. 
Socialism, 64f., 293 

Social problem, 272ff., 296ff. 
Socio-economic interest, 25, 


5off. 
Sociology, 63ff. 
Socrates, 31 
Spencer, H., 38, 52 
Spener, P., 152 
Spinoza, B., 116 
Stein, Ludwig, 22, 296 
Strauss, D. F., 118, 217, 228 
Sueskind, H., 245 


Tertullian, 195, 206 

Thoburn, Bishop, 195 

Tindal, Matthew, 208, 211 

Toland, John, 209 

Troeltsch, E., 140, 206, 221, 
223, 231,234, (226teeaa. 
293, 298, 300, 310. 

Tyrrell, George, 252 


Utility as test of truth, 25:f. 
Utility, social, and religion, 
253tf., 271 ff. 


Value-judgments, 166ff. 
Vatke, W., 117 

Von Hiugel, F., 247 
Von Sybel, H., 296 | 


Ward, H. F., 299, 319 
Weber, Max, 293 
Wellhausen, J., 117 
Wells, H. G., 77, 306f. 
Wesley, John, 153, 174 
Wilm, E. C., 190 
Windelbrand, W., 95 
World-cycles, 56f., 2721. 


ry 


mie’. wet Lian uy, 
an) ee a yD 
fF 


an 





» a . 


Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 


i 


1 01247 3635 — 


| 
=e 
et 


S 
@ 


. i 
. $ ‘ i 
€ q AB 
@ 


iM i 








Miter entice 
Hedy 


b as EP Shh SRS 
OF eye AUS Rote oe Au, 


Darts od 
Faint 





